First good one in a while
If you played the last transformers game by High Moon and found the weapons not too useful, the friendly AI to be not much more than window dressing, the different character classes to be mostly indistinguishable from one one another, and were just generally wishing for a better game. . . . . You're in luck.
The single-player campaign is short, but fun in this precursor-to-the-movie game. Every transformer has three modes: straight vehicle, which is fast but weaponless, a vehicle attack mode which is weaponized but not as fast, and of course a robot mode which is slowest, but offers the most choice for weaponry.
Among the choices I appreciated in this game:
- The switch between robot and weaponized vehicle is a single click or press, while the switch from weaponized vehicle to straight vehicle is a trigger pull. This makes it very easy to speed around a level without weapons, then release the trigger and very quickly be ready for battle.
- The targeting felt much tighter than War For Cybertron. It didn't feel like complete lock-on, but had enough assist that I didn't feel like I was just hosing down an area with bullets.
Aside from what I consider to be fixed issues from the previous game, this one also feels like the developer paid attention to the scale of the world. When moving through levels in the game, I very much felt like I was a giant robot making my way through places that had originally been designed with humans in mind. Obviously this wasn't going to be the case in War For Cybertron, but it's something I have also felt was missing from previous transformers games as well; the feeling that you are in fact playing the part of a giant robot, not just a robot shaped character moving through an oddly scaled environment.
I don't do much online MP, so I can't say for certain how it stacks up against other games in that area, but for the bit I did play, I absolutely felt like there was a difference between the different classes available; a team of scouts might be able to take on a team of leader/warrior class 'bots, but only if they used good tactics. The leveling up felt a bit slow and grind-y, but it's very possible this is because I was outmatched by better players/teams and simply didn't score enough to progress quickly.
If you have Gamefly or a Redbox, I think this is a really good rental game, or a decent purchase a few months from now at probably around 20.00