Platformines: Turrarrrrerria

Platformines is a greenlight game released in the Bandai Namco bundle that I bought to get my hands on the new Pac Man game. I'm not really sure what to make of the game based on its title or its cover, but it is essentially a Terraria game by way of extreme simplification and 16-bit graphics instead of whatever the usual is.

The game is a platforming, run and gun treasure hunt by its own admission. There are four kinds of loot: A limited selection of guns, a limited selection of hats, gems and valuables. You run around randomly generated sections of the huge, huge map looking to complete your digger to escape the horror of the mines. And they are horrible, though I'm not really sure how you got there and even less how the giant titted saleswoman got there either.

The graphics are, as I said, 16-bit pixel are. They're smooth and pretty good looking, the game is easy on the eyes and relatively clear to sight. The game has an obnoxious fog of war element that is on the most part just a nuisance and doesn't add much. There was a potential here for human enemies to cast light while nonhuman would not, but like everything else the game is just explicitly lazy and there you go. Terraria had lighting, it was a big part of how its engine ever looked good, but this ... does not.

Enemies come in a variety of forms. Most dangerous are people with bazookas, since although you suffer friendly fire damage from your bazooka, they can happily walks on all hazards and slam themselves in the face with rockets to seemingly no negative effect. Most of the other enemies are floaty nonsense, or hazards you can't damage, most of it pretty boring. The one interesting element is they have a variety of AI routines, so they might be more or less aggressive, or more or less willing to jump around, stay still, etc. It is actually sort of neat watching the different AIs run around each other, but there is actually basically no reason to pay attention to the enemies. They are almost uniformly better to just avoid, and pick off the dumb ones. There is damage on touch (because this game is lazy) even on human enemies, but there is no knock back, so you really can and should run through everything.

Loot is extremely boring, I think it might closely resemble Borderlands, which I've never played. There are four guns - though you never use the pistol, so basically there are three guns - which have a variety of stats. You get drops, and some of them have better stats. Everything else you take back to the saleswoman in the hide out and process into gold or credits or whatever dollars. You upgrade your bag and your health though her, that's the entire loot system. You can use gems found in the wild to heal yourself, which once you have the bag space, you should always hold on to do.

The game builds random levels, and in this regard, it reminds me less of things Terraria or on the other end of the spectrum Rogue Legacy, and more like the random map generation from HoMM3. Things are just sloppy and ill put together, which a lot of irritating dead ends and this creeping realization that anything that looks interesting just isn't worth interacting with. Going through a maze to find 2 bags of gold just isn't worth the risk of doing, or the time, or anything else. The hazard platforming is intentionally sloppy, because it is built with RNG it doesn't really bother to behave in any organized fashion. So the hallway of knives or traps basically just goes off at random, so trying to chart your way through it like you would a normal platformer doesn't work.

Basically while I like the tileset, the game is just so lazy about its level design. There is no real feeling you're going into a harder or easier area, and teleporters to go back to the hideout are always completely randomly placed. Usually they're in like, the ceiling, and you fall out of it and immediately take damage. I feel like if you re-worked the routine to make for somewhat more epic looking terrain, the tiles and graphics would add up to something interesting, but as is the game is incredibly repetitive and too zoomed in.

I had to turn the music off. It is bad. It's especially weird in that the visuals are clean and smooth, but the music feels like an agonizing random mess. Maybe the music was generated by a routine as well. It wouldn't shock me.

Anyway while I wouldn't say platformines was outright terrible, it is pretty mediocre and handicaps itself at every turn. The loot system is more limited than it should be - more gear could easily be done, but instead all of you have is hats - and the routine used to build levels doesn't make anything cool. As Terraria has light in the dark, Platformines has an awful fog of war system and range issues and just everything to make it extremely monotonous.

Basically, while the game is fun to tool around with for an hour or two, you come into the realization this is it and there's nothing new or exciting. If you look at like, Terraria, the world map has regions where you go 'dang that's creepy' and you find treasure you actually want. This game, well, you basically should just past everything hard and skip to each of the nine finish game items.

I eventually gave up, not because it got too difficult, as it remains about the same the whole way through, but because the map kept choking off any progress and after twenty minutes of getting no closer to the next item I just got the feeling the rng might just be total garbage and moved on with my life.