Following the billion dollar showing Transformers: Dark of the Moon had in theaters this past summer, Transformers nostalgia has either reached a feverish, delusional pitch, or become the most baffling, insulting, painful thing in the world, depending on who you ask. For the latter folk, you can just go ahead and sit this announcement out, as we're going to be talking a whole bunch about robots that transform into stuff.
Revealed today as Game Informer's November cover, Activision and High Moon Studios unveiled Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, the follow-up to 2009's generally liked non-movie Transformers game, Transformers: War for Cybertron. For anyone who didn't play that game, uh, spoilers, I guess. Cybertron falls. Oops?
Of course, the G.I. guys are keeping the bulk of the details entombed within the confines of the upcoming November magazine, but based on the dual covers revealed for the game, we can already presume a darker, grittier tone to this sequel. One cover features a mournful Optimus Prime cradling the metallic corpse of Bumblebee, which just turned my six-year-old-self into a shrieking, sobbing mess, much as when Optimus died in the Transformers animated film. Oh, uh, spoilers there too, I guess.
Before anyone starts getting into long-winded debates about whether robotic creatures can truly "die," given their presumed lack of a soul, or at least insofar as spiritually minded people understand them to exist, I would just like to point out that the other cover also features the long-absent, self-referential hero Grimlock, leader of the Dinobots and frequent referrer of himself in the third person. When you realize that, within this universe, there exists the giant dinosaur robot equivalent of Rickey Henderson, trying to debate whether these creatures contain an incorporeal essence that exists outside of their physical being seems more than a little bit silly. It's a robot. That turns into a dinosaur. Stop it.
We'll all undoubtedly learn much more about Fall of Cybertron in next month's Game Informer. Or we'll learn more from the sites that pick up next month's Game Informer and reprint all of the pertinent information. One of the two.
