You start out by customizing your grunt and while the options aren’t too expansive, there’s a good amount of silly or serious to choose from. The objective of the game is to find pieces of your destroyed spaceship and, along the way, you can unlock stronger guns and equipment to aid you on your journey.
The game features three different modes: Normal, Hardcore, and Ironman. Each mode, is unlocked with the completion of the previous difficulty. Increased difficulties, in addition to map randomization, add good replay value to the game.
- Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya.
After creating my game, it took me a while to figure out what I was doing. There are tips to guide you along the way, but it seemed pretty cluttered and key interactive parts of the background didn’t seem to pop as much.
My only real gripe is the looping reinvented classic music. It drives me up a wall. Thankfully, there’s an option to turn off the music so I was able to replace Skrillex’s remix of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy with some Anamanaguchi. The originality of the baddies tends to die out when you start seeing re-skinned, tougher versions of weaker enemies. Half the fun of the game is finding new weapons to mow down monsters, the other half is exploration of new maps.
The controls are fluid and the game has added controller support, which makes running and gunning that much more fun. The ability to jump multiple times kind of feels like a cop-out to the whole platformer aspect of the game.
Personally, I like platformers to be a bit more challenging in the sense of reaching, you know… platforms. The RPG elements of the game are there, but they don’t shine bright enough. There’s a lack of boss fights and there’s no diversity in objectives to change up the monotony. If you’re a fan of Contra-style shooters with a Borderlands twist, this is the game for you. Don’t expect too much depth, but there are some good hours to be put into Platformines.
Platformines, developed by Magiko Gaming and published by Namco-Bandai, is currently available on Steam.
