Lucky me, in my quest to review as many games as possible, gets to write the first review for Hold The Plates.
Hold The Plates seems more like a student programming project or a demo than a serious game. It's an ultra minimalist 2D "arcade" Pong-like physics game where you have a flat paddle (a plate) and you must catch smaller falling plates. So basically Pong, but instead of balls bouncing off your paddle, they're plates and they weigh down your platter and make it tilt. Controls are limited to left and right, so the skill of this game is just to try balance as many falling plates as you can. It doesn't seem like there's any high score which makes this an even more pointess experience than playing Space Invaders just to see how high you can make the score go (I never saw the appeal of that anyway). Apparently you can win if your platter goes down between the tables (it rises slowly until you load it with plates). So maybe this is more like that ball on a string attached to a cup toy? What fun.
So this is a very shallow experience without any real depth and that corresponds to the very mediocre technical delivery.
The game features extremely lazy, minimalist pixel "art". Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
The game is completely free. Nothing speaks more to a developers belief in themselves and their product than making their game available for everyone without remuneration. It's a shame in this case that this is barely a game and more like some kind of home project, without any real depth or interest. There's no "maybe" option in Steam, unfortunately, but I hope to see more work from this developer, perhaps as part of a professional game development company that can make full use of their talents without needing to make budget/quality compromises.
