So, pardon me while I geek out for a second.
When it was originally announced, I wasn’t all that interested in Transformers: War for Cybertron. After all, there hadn’t yet been a game that captured what was actually good about Transformers… well, ever. Not to mention, with the recent Michael Bay-ification of the franchise, what were the chances it would appeal to a G1 fan like me, and not the more recent (and awful) stuff?
Fortunately, someone I new (hi, Chad) was ludicrously excited about the game, and wouldn’t shut up about it. So I ended up biting the bullet and picking the game up. First good sign? The game was sold out almost everywhere. Second good sign? Stellar reviews. Third good sign? Ridiculous end credit sequence with song by Stan Bush posted to YouTube.
Anyway – I finally plonked it into the 360, and … wow. Now, I know I’m late to the WfC evangelism crowd, here, but holy cow. In terms of a game that does its license right, WfC is up there, if not better than Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was one of the biggest surprises of last year. The developers, High Moon, either genuinely LOVE the source material, or can fake it very, very well.
Everything just screams reverence for the source material – from the writing, which is faithful to the tone of the original TV show, to weird little snippets that are familiar to the hardcore fans of the series. There’s a point, about halfway through the game, where the word, “Guilty…” made me feel like I was 10 again.
More than that, though – more than the bickering between Megatron & Starscream (who have excellent new voices), to the new “transforming sound,” which is still reminiscent of the original – the game itself is awesome.
Stripped of its license, it’s a more-than-passable 3rd person action game with some neat mechanics. Add in 3-player co-op, a great twist on Gears of War 2′s Horde Mode, and then stick on a Call of Duty-inspired class-based multiplayer mode, and you’ve got a game that’s just a ludicrous abundance of riches. Everything’s well-implmented, well-thought out, and solidly designed. With a campaign and a couple multiplayer modes, there *should* be something in here that feels like it was second fiddle. There isn’t. It’s all solid.
The transforming mechanics aren’t necessarily all that useful in the single player game. There are times when you’ll need to fly, where it’s cut & dried, but for the most part, transforming is left up to the player. In multiplayer/horde, though, you *need* to transform to survive. With the scout, your speed & mobility is the point of your class – and hitting a jump, transforming into robot form, cloaking, jumping into a crowd of enemies, meleeing someone from behind as you come out of cloak… it’s like how you played with toys when you were a kid, except now you can do that in a game with dozens of other people.
It’s bonkers. Absolutely bonkers.
If you have any love of Transformers at all, you *have* to have this game. Kudos to High Moon, who pulled off a game that goes well beyond what I thought was possible with the franchise. I can’t wait to see what they do next (though I sincerely hope it’s WfC 2)!
It’s mind-boggling how balanced the multiplayer is. Usually a few weeks into any console shooter and I’m ready to call it quits because of some frustrating exploit that everyone but me seems to be taking advantage of. It’s easy to spot when it happens, because everyone will be playing the same class and/or using the same weapons. Not the case with this game so far. There’s a pretty even spread to the classes, and even the leveling up doesn’t seem to unbalance things to an unreasonable degree. It’s all extremely polished for what’s hopefully the first of many.
Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that..