Platformines Reviews

Good, but not great. First and foremost, this is a good game with hours of gameplay and phenomenal music, but it gets stale fairly quick. The difficulty does not scale very well as it jumps from feasible to a loop of deaths. The endgame is easy to get to but insane to clear as equipment gets impossibly hard to obtain due to the expensive prices. In the end, it's fun to play for the first few hours then it just becomes annoying.

This game is a procedural work of enjoyable frustration, you can attack using all four directions, it's a great 'limitation' that is overlooked in these days of dual-analogue-stick controllers. Takes you back to a time when technological limitations were part of the game's appeal. You type in a world name and - based on your choice of string I'd imagine - the world is created and saved for your future spelunking. Having only the four main directions - UDLR to shoot, and because projectiles take time to move, it is challenging to have accuracy and speed. However, unlimited ammunition helps. This game is another loot-replacement-simulator, trying to locate and salvage your 8 ship-fixing technoguns, all the while upgrading your funky hat collection, and 4 styles of firearm. After you collect the ship-fixing technoguns, you get to piece together a puzzle before escaping out of the hell you crash landed on.

Ok, first off this game isn't perfect. Isn't perfect for a $60 game I mean. Some people will complain about anything. This game is fantastic. It's like a little Borderlands and the maps are HUGE. Tons of gameplay here for $10. At the moment of writing this the game does not properly support all TV resolutions. Get some overscan on my computer but not a big deal. That's actually why I'm here writing a review; I had to restart the game to get it windowed. Other than that I have no complaints. To sum this game up I would have to say, "Borderlands. Steamworld Dig. Contra. Terraria."

There is something incredible about this game. It’s called love ♥ Platformines is a perfect mix of platform, shooting and RPG. You play on a huge map so big that you might need months to explore everything. The shooting experience is very interesting. You need to watch out everything, dodge and shoot. Also you need to master the multi-jump to elaborate crazy strategies. That’s what makes Platformines unique of its kind. Deeper you go into the mine the harder it gets. But that’s the best way to find powerful weapons, money and minerals. Using portals you can go back to your base, buy and sell weapon and equipment. With this game in hand you will see how fun and beautiful a pixel art game can be. It’s an old fashioned game made for nostalgic players using today’s technology. Even the music is made the old way using 8-bit sound mixed with modern sound. The only drawback I can think of is about the Uzi. It looks great; fires a lot of bullets but it makes almost no damage. (Maybe I didn’t use it the right way) Anyway it’s a great game, very unique and you will get lots of fun playing it.

Excellent RPG shooter/platformer. Really love the screen music. An excellent version of, 'In the Hall Of The Mountain King' by Grieg, which is basically the Manic Miner music is included. The other tracks in-game are really awesome also - varied in style and atmospheric. More varied and a lot better than I thought it would be, from the trailer! The game reminds me a bit of a large randomized Jet Set Willy, with a new world created at the start of the game, and the player can save progression and teleport to other parts of the large map, (once you have explored to and discovered the next teleporter). There is more to the game than just discovering teleporters though! The game reminds me a bit of a few other 8-bit classics, such as Turrican and Monty of The Run (edit: maybe it was Auf Wiedersehen Monty that had a huge map), as these games had huge maps also. Although having said that, the gameplay is brilliantly unique. The graphics are very well done, with lots of different items, weapons and enemies. 10/10 Excellent game. Lots of exploring, collecting and shooting to be done.

Ohnoes! The Robodig is destroyed and you must fix it! Or something! So let's just shoot the story and go for a little platforming and shooting and loot collecting... in a mine! Platformines is a nice package indeed, combining features from several genres to create a fun game that does nothing really new but still feels fresh. You start by creating a male or female character from a couple of visual options, and are then brought into a randomly generated mine (where your ship, the Robodog, totally crashed). Your job is to explore the mine and relocate several building blocks to restore the ship- and to do so you need to fight masses of enemies, collect coins and loot, upgrade your equipment and be an all-round badass. You also get to listen to a chiptune rendition of "Hall of the Mountain King." Platforming is nice and precise even with a keyboard, though a pad is clearly better. From the get-go you have quintuple jumps, and there is almost no momentum, so you'll quickly put Mario to shame by staying airborne and shooting things easily. Vanity items you collect can give you even more jumps and also change armour rating, weapon damage, and other attributes. Shooting feels old-school and satisfying. You can equip up to four weapons (pistol, shotgun, machine gun and launcher) and just like the Borderlands games every weapon is procedurally generated, so you'll often find something surprising. There's no ammo limit either; while weapons have magazines and reload times you always have "infinite bullets". And there's more equipment, most notably energy belts that increase the amount of damage you can take but also larger backpacks: You'll collect gems on your way to sell in your homebase OR, and this is interesting, to replenish your shield belts. Do you dare to try and secure that teleporter over there and chash in on the gems, or would you rather play it save and spend them to make it further down the mine? All in all, this really feels like an over the top "roguelike" without permadeath. Your home base is a safe haven where you can store loot, shop a little, and save your progess. The mine is constantly repopulated with enemies so if you need to grind for money you'll soon have some "easy places" to get some cash. It's NOT a metroidvania game- from the get-go you're able to explore as you see fit, only limited by your firepower and skill. And is it fun? That's the most important question after all! And yes, it is. It's a fun little platform shooter with charming retro graphics and a lot of replayability. It's not OUTSTANDING and it doesn't really do anything new, but it's a nice mix of genres that'll keep fans of simple arcade games entertained for a good while!

Not great but kind of fun. I would only recommend if you feel like lotsa repeatative searching for things. The world map is HUGE, but you only need to explore a small portion to get what you need to beat the game. And that ending...holy crust...too lame. But it was sorta fun for a minute. I would only recommend buying on hardcore sale if you want something to do between burning out on other games and moving onto the next good game you plan to get deep into.

Platformines has been one of my bigger surprises of 2014 so far. Launching in late March without much, or really close to any fanfare, I decided to install it one rainy Saturday afternoon and it was like finding a box of brightly colored toys in a dusty, spidery attic. A lot of the gameplay elements here are very familiar -- precision platforming, gobs of randomized loot, a never-ending cycle of weapon upgrades -- but it feels fresh, these elements were never combined in quite this way before. It reminds me most of the lauded roguelike platformer Spelunky, except where Spelunky is all about survival, Platformines is more about exploration and aggression. There is a very large overworld to explore, and the further you move away from your base in the middle(ish) of the map in any direction, the more difficult the enemies are, enemies you can eliminate with one of four different types of gun. After finishing the game on the default difficultly level (5-6 hours) I uncovered about 25% of the map, so there's a lot of map here to explore if you're willing. There's also a fun, punk-pixel sense of style from outlandish costumes and hair-dos to five-eyed blob monsters to platforms filled with whirring blades of bloody death. On the downside, the game is a tad on the short side, but for the price and the type of game, I'm really not sure a 10-20 hour epic would have worked. I would have liked to have seen more enemy and area variety, plus a better reward for finishing the game rather than "the same thing, only harder," but I certainly don't feel cheated in any way. This was a great little game from out of left field, and I'm going to be keeping an eye on Magiko to see what they come up with in the future.

End game is brutal. The equipment doesn't scale with the enemies, and so the game goes from a really cool Borderlands-lite experience early on, to a mindless and repetitive grind between recharging trips back home later on. A lot of promise, but poor execution from this console port. 5/10

Do you like loot + platforming + randomised levels? Look no further. With elements of Steamworld Dig (randomised mines, collect minerals of ever-increasing value the deeper you go, locate portals for quick returns in trickier parts of the map) this offers plenty of replayability, even though the shooting and platforming elements start to get a little repetitive over what seems to be a single enormous level. Similar to the level creation in Cargo Commander, you give your new level a name and the game randomises it based on that name...somehow. The deeper you go into the mines, the more chance you have of scoring better guns, although the loot system is a little disappointing. There aren't randomised gun effects, only % stats (higher damage, firing rate, etc) and there are precious few different hats you can wear to give you extra stuff, like 2 additional jumps (yes, you can jump 5, 6 or even 7 times in the air). Jumping feels a little floaty, and your gun has the annoying tendancy to point upwards when you're jumping up to a higher platform, meaning you inadvertently fire vertically rather than horizontally like you were expecting. However once you get used to how your character moves, you'll be zipping around levels in no time (an XBox 360 controller is recommended). Your character can only see a limited distance around him/her, and when you get damaged this cone of vision starts to shrink, meaning you can get into some really nasty spots with extremely limited vision - you may find this a welcome addition or an annoyance. Still, those quibbles aside, Platformines offers a ton of platforming content and that addictive, often elusive "just one more play until I get to the next portal/find a better gun/grab that sparkly bit of ore over there" feel. Here's hoping the developers add more randomised loot and abilities in a future patch. There's certainly no reason to try the demo first and see if you like it.