PLOID Review – What Happens if You Have a Large Hit Box, Limited Invincibility Frames, and No Check Points?

Sometimes one’s expectations can get the better of you. Since I have nostalgia for side scrolling platformers, when I first saw PLOID on Indie Heroes Collection 1 for the Evercade I really wanted to play it. Sadly, I was very disappointed.

Premise, Control, and Music

To begin, PLOID is an indie game for the NES that came out in 2020. The premise is that a previously defeated enemy is back. To overcome him again you need to acquire 7 sacred floppy disks from some temples so you can evolve into a more powerful form and defeat him again.

You do this by going through different maze-like levels, navigating across platforms and traps, and picking up items that may increase your firepower. The game only uses two buttons, and your movement options are limited. You can fire your gun to the left and right, and jump. That’s it. You can’t duck or fire in any other directions. Despite having limited control options, doing simple actions was OK.

I thought the art was kind of cute for the main character and some of the music was good. My kids and I enjoyed the intro music and the regular stage music most of the time. In fact, the music is probably the best part of the game!

Sadly, I don’t like hardly anything else about the game. Unlike my review of Anguna: Warriors of Virtue, this one is going to be almost entirely negative.

Gameplay

The major hindrance for this title is its gameplay design. Like I wrote earlier, your character is cute. He’s also a big sprite and has a giant hit box. This caused me to routinely smash into enemy bullets even when trying to avoid them.

To add insult to injury, the number of invincibility frames you have after being hit is very low. If an enemy is shooting two or three bullets at you, there’s a very good chance that not only will the first bullet hit you, but the third one will as well. Since you only have 5 hit points, I often lost 40% of my life bar in about a second while playing.

Moreover, at one point I fell on some spikes early in the game by accident. I watched in horror as I went from 5 hit points to 1 almost immediately. The only reason why I didn’t die was because I somehow jumped to a safe platform in the nick of time. This was very frustrating and I will come back to this at the end of my review.

What makes these two examples big deals is that there is no way to restore your hit points. I never found health restoring items in the whole game. The last time I played it I even spent a few minutes trying all sorts of standard NES-style button combinations to try to restore my health. All of this was to no avail. The only way to restore hit points is to beat a level or die.

Oh, and about beating levels, each one ends with a boss fight. The main way I beat them was to use the Evercade’s turbo-fire feature, get super close to them, keep jumping and shooting, and just hope that the AI for the boss was particularly stupid.

How often they fired their weapons, and if the direction they fired made sense, really felt random. I just hoped they acted dumb for once so I could move on to the next stage. I almost never had a sense of satisfaction for defeating them. It was more like a feeling of relief, knowing I was closer to completing the game.

But it gets worse.

Not only do you have,

• A large hit box,
• Limited invincibility frames,
• And no way to restore your health.

But after every death you are sent back to the very beginning of the level. I never found any mid-stage check points while I played!

Essentially, the only way I was able to make any progress in PLOID was through save scumming after every screen or two. Sometimes I even relied on multiple save states per level. The next section of the review will explain why.

An Infernal Maze

To preface this section, let me say that many of the stages have maze elements where there are multiple routes you could take to get to different points. If you go the wrong way, these often result in dead ends or take you to a place you’ve already been. To my knowledge, only one route takes you to the sacred floppy disk you need at the end of the level.

Infuriatingly so, one of the last levels is like a super maze with multiple screens that have two routes to go. One will be the correct way and another will take you nowhere good. Sometimes a path will take you to a previous level in the game. The main way I knew where to go was a combination of educated guesses, rampant save scumming that I used to test bad routes, and if the background changed from one to another in a logical order.

You see, each temple, or stage, has its own set of graphics and enemies. In this latter maze of hatred I surmised that as long as the backgrounds were changing in the order that the game had presented the last five stages before, then it was likely that I was on the correct path.

Thankfully that hunch was correct.

Eventually I was able to beat this terrible maze and continue on to the last level. Through the power of unashamed save scumming, I was able to “beat” the game!

But the terror was not done…

An Infernal EX-MODE Maze

In preparation for this review, a nagging thought kept coming to me. Should I give PLOID one more chance? Didn’t the title screen mention an EX-MODE? To these questions, the answer was “Yes.”

So, I tried out EX-MODE to give the game another try. It was like the Infuriating Maze, but with no extra lives, no continues, and no way to restore your health. At least in the regular game mode you have extra lives.

As I played this mode, I found yet another dead end. Whatever. Then I turned around and kept going. I had one hit point left and I thought I could be on the right track. But then I came to a screen where an enemy fish would instantly go down and to the right at the bottom of the screen once I showed up. It would become stuck on the ladder, with no way to go back up.

I wanted to go down the ladder, but as I shared earlier, there’s no way to shoot up, down, or at an angle in PLOID. As I reflected on my predicament, I stood at the top of the screen and literally said, “I’m done! I’m done!”

I then turned off my Evercade with no plans to ever play this game again.

In Closing

As I’ve shared before, there are a couple of things I like about PLOID. The main characters look cute and the music is good. Unfortunately, I greatly dislike almost everything else about it. Especially the gameplay design.

You may recall that I mentioned falling on some spikes and losing 4 out of 5 hit points in about 1 second earlier in the review. I did that while playing the game on my Technos Super Pocket. After trying in vain to restore my character’s hit points I turned off the game.

I wasn’t done playing for the night, and I wanted to clean out the bad taste in my mouth that PLOID had left.

Going through the list of built-in Technos games on my system, I came to the arcade classic, Double Dragon! As I credit fed my way to victory, I reflected on the platformer with irritating mazes, thinking about how to review it.

At the very least, my irritation from PLOID propelled me to complete a great beat’em up again for the first time in decades. I’ll probably review it some day in the far-off future. Oddly enough, my thoughts about it may be mildly connected with PLOID from Indie Heroes Collection 1 from now on.

I’ll also add this: I shared near the beginning that I was interested in playing PLOID when I first saw it. Before doing so, I also learned of PLOID SAGA available on Steam. It includes two games that are not available on Evercade. I purchased them at a discount. Was that a bad idea? I hope I will like them more than this or Uchusen: Ultimate Ploid Battle, which I reviewed earlier.

Title: PLOID (Kickstarter Page)
Genre: Action Platformer
Year Released: 2020
Developer: Nape Games (Homepage no longer active)
Available On: NES and Evercade through Indie Heroes Collection 1.
Price Paid: $1.14, or $16.00 for Indie Heroes Collection 1

Remember, we can have different opinions about the games we play. If you like something more (or less) than I do, both of our perspectives are valid.