Transistor

At first glance, Transistor looks like a sci-fi version of Supergiant Games’ Bastion. With the paint-style graphics, isometric perspective, and the voice of Bastion narrator Logan Cunningham constantly feeding you information about the story, I was a bit worried that Supergiant played it a bit safe with Transistor – sticking to the formula that was successful for them. With Transistor being only their second game, I was also a bit worried that Supergiant would become a sort of one-trick pony. Fortunately, Transistor’s similarities to Bastion are only skin deep. Unfortunately, Transistor is nowhere near as good as Bastion.

The game wastes very little time getting started. In fact, it wastes no time getting started. There is no menu, no tutorial, and no introductory cinematic to set the pace. You hit start and you are playing. This is a bit jarring at first, since you are given literally no context as to what is going on. You are then forced to obtain a talking sword that is sticking out of a corpse of a man. When you do so, he gives you a loose introduction to the story. You are Red, a very talented singer, who was targeted for assassination after one of her performances by a mysterious group called the Camerata. The attempt was intervened by the man and he was killed by the sword – called the Transistor - which caused his consciousness to be absorbed into it. While Red survived the encounter, her voice was stolen by the Camerata, who then fled. Red, with talking sword in hand, sets off across the futuristic utopian society of Cloudbank to find the Camerata and uncover the truth behind the assassination while retrieving her stolen voice.

On paper, the premise to Transistor seems simple enough, but the story is presented in such a way that makes it difficult to piece things together. As you progress, the Transistor will tell you little tidbits about the world of Cloudbank and prior events that led to the moment of the game’s opening. Because so little is given to you up front and the world of Cloudbank is so rich and dense with backstory, the Transistor will just constantly talk at every opportunity. Did you walk by a bench next to the river? Well, the Transistor is here to tell you about how he used to sit there and throw rocks into it. Did you pass by a store? The Transistor loves that store, although he can’t afford to shop there very often. The amount of times the Transistor chimes in with these throw-away lines gets very annoying, and that happens until the very end of the game. It’s too bad the Transistor doesn’t know that much about what is actually going on in the story, however, because he doesn’t tell you a whole lot of useful information. It seems like all of the little bits of story that you discover – from the Transistor’s narration, terminals that you find throughout the levels, and character biographies that you uncover – are there to just inform you more about the universe you are in. Supergiant seems to be more impressed with the world they have created than the actual story that they put in it, although the world is pretty derivative of a lot of futuristic utopian societies in fiction. As a result, they do a poor job on informing you of what’s going on. Even as the game reached its conclusion, I found myself struggling to understand basic plot points, which made the attempt at a powerful and thought-provoking ending completely fall flat for me.

But how does Red go about dealing with her adversaries on her adventure? Transistor is an action-RPG with a twist. The combat takes place in real time, but Red is extremely vulnerable and doesn’t have much in the way of combat prowess. That’s where the Transistor comes in. Red can use the Transistor’s abilities that she collects throughout her journey to attack her foes. The crux of the combat, however, comes from the fact that you can pause the action and plan out your next few attacks. After you plan out your moves, you can then resume the action and Red will carry out the actions that you queued up before the enemies have a chance to move. Once she is done, everything returns to normal and you are forced to wait for the pause ability to recharge, and unless you have a certain ability that allows you to do so, you are unable to use skills while it is recharging. If you are looking for a more action-oriented game like Bastion, you will be disappointed. I attempted to play the game as if it were Bastion and never use the pause feature, but the combination of Red’s vulnerability and the fact that all the skills have a small delay after the button is pressed before they are carried out makes it nearly impossible. The only time I forwent the pause function was when I had only a few remaining enemies that could be taken down without the need for it. The game is definitely meant to be played more tactically.

This system works… about half of the time. There were definitely times where I planned out a very long string of attacks and they all went off without a hitch. It felt great to watch Red zoom around the battlefield and slay every one of my enemies in one turn. A lot of the time, however, attacks that I planned would completely miss the enemies for no apparent reason, leaving me completely vulnerable afterward. This was very frustrating. The inability to perform any skills while the pause function is recharging is problematic as well. Enemies are just relentless pummeling you while you wait for your meter to fill back up and there’s nary a thing you can do about it. When these situations happen, it is extremely unpleasant, and it happens quite a bit. A big portion of your time fighting in Transistor will be running around while watching your pause meter fill up before you can use your skills again.

When your pause meter is filled back up, you may be disappointed by the selection of skills you chose. In Transistor, you are allowed to bring with you four skills at a time. The variety, however, comes from the fact that any skill can have a skill placed onto another skill to alter its properties, or you can place a skill into a passive slot to enhance your defenses, reduce the timer on your pause function, and so on. There are about 18 skills in the game, so you can see how the skill system can be pretty overwhelming. While it can be too much at times, it leads to a hidden depth that makes the combat intriguing. The game encourages you to use different skills every time you reach a checkpoint, too, as doing so unlocks lore that helps fill in the blanks of Cloudbank. Since I wanted to know as much as I could, I never settled on one set of skills for too long, and it definitely made the combat encounters more varied. A set of challenge rooms (not unlike Bastion’s) encourages you to experiment even more with different sets of skills.

It is good that the skills give you a lot of variety, though, since the combat encounters do not. You will face the same few enemies over and over again, only they get a little more challenging as the game progresses. The enemies that you face aren’t even that particularly interesting, either. They all have their little tricks, but they are all generally manageable and don’t take a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to defeat. Most enemies can be killed by pausing the game, queuing up your strongest attack multiple times, and hitting resume. If you’re using a good build, doing this can wipe out many enemies at once. The few encounters that I actually found challenging and interesting were the boss encounters, which there are far too few of. You can increase the difficulty of the game by adding modifiers that change the game up. If you are familiar to Bastion’s Idol system, it is identical to that – the more modifiers that you have in place, the greater experience rewards you get for defeating enemies (which, in Transistor, gives you access to skills faster). Modifiers can limit the number of skills you can take in battle, change the properties of enemies, etc. I turned on every single one of them I could, and while I found myself to be in a hairy spot on occasion, it was nothing I couldn’t handle without patience. The game is not tremendously difficult. When you die, you lose access to your most powerful skill until you reach the next checkpoint. When you run out of skills, you have to start the battle over.

It’s made easier to endure the combat when the visuals are so pretty, though. In fact, the entirety of Transistor’s presentation is fantastic. I could take a screenshot of just about any area in the game and hang it up on my wall. It truly is gorgeous. The visuals are complimented by a fantastic soundtrack, too, and it makes the game way more atmospheric than it has any right to be. The one gripe I have is that the scenery doesn’t change all that much – you generally see nothing but the streets of Cloudbank – but there are some genuinely striking areas near the end of the game.

While the gorgeous presentation does little to improve the lackluster story and uninteresting combat encounters, the deep and varied combat system will keep you entertained through most of the six hour or so campaign. I just wish I could lose myself in the world like I did with Bastion.