Transformers: War for Cybertron

Review from Starks - Monday, 02 August 2010 @ 11:51am

Transformers is one of those golden egg or cash cow franchises for Hollywood. A veritable gold mine of profit if you get it right, no doubt Paramount must have thought they'd rubbed the belly of Buddha with the success of the original movie. I'm still reeling over the fact they butchered the second, but then that's what you get when you throw the dice of Michael Bay; You're lucky if you get a 7 on the first hit, and stupid to try for a second time.

And yet they still made a fricken fortune.

Anyway, I picked this title up with the hope that I would roll lucky number 7. Sad to say, I got snake eyes.

So let me set the scene. Transformers: War for Cybertron is set, in the movie timeline, just before the Autobots and Decepticons bring their intergalactic war to earth. It centres around the story of Megatron wishing to return Cybertron to its former glory. Or, at least, the glory he believes in. It's a typical 'Good guy, bad guy' scenario. I wouldn't be surprised if High Moon Studio's employed the same ignorant monkeys who wrote the Revenge of the Fallen script to write the story for the game.

The game starts with Megatron setting out to try and find and attain 'Dark Energon'; some mystical energy source that everyone is warning him against yet the big evil guy is trying to find in order to 'take over the world' and spell doom to all those who oppose him *cue evil laugh*. Yes, like I said, it's terribly cliched.

Big shiny dude

And so we move into the first level. To be honest, I wasn't entirely disappointed. Yet. For a 3rd person shooter, it looked good, it seemed to handle fairly well and the guns gave nice big boom sounds. Given Gears of War really has set the scene for 3PS, this got close enough to make me shrug and go 'meh, it's not bad'.

Graphically, the game is fairly good.The planet looks amazing, if a little over-detailed. What I mean by this is it sometimes became difficult to distinguish friend from foe, wall from crate. Yes, when the cut scenes were on it looked good, but to play it was a little more difficult.

The explosions themselves, and the destruction animations, left a lot to be desired. Frankly, I've seen better explosions on a 486, but then we expect bigger from games these days given the technological advances and capabilities we've seen since I junked my old DX-33.

When playing through, I started to smile a little. Here I was, Megatron, leader of the Decepticons, blowing stuff up, bashing some Autobots and Starscream minions with my giant mace and turning into a tank with a massive cannon. It was pretty cool just running in to hordes of the enemy and swinging my giant cod piece.

I quit out of the campaign and started up the Autobot side and discovered that was a mistake of sorts. The campaign is all one story thread, and starting with the Autobots cuts out half the story and sees the player taken into the future. Shrugging this, I continued on and had some fun with Optimus Prime as he swung his giant axe and clobbered some Decepticons.

And then it dawned on me. Let me explain.

In a game like this, the major thread to it all is the story. If your story is rubbish, it doesn't matter how good your graphics are or how good your game mechanics are; It's all out the window if your story is crap. Transformers: War for Cybertron has a piss-poor story arc linking everything together and once your realise this it's like someone has turned the light on and you see the game for what it is.

It defies belief that with all the amazing studios that develop games, that despite the incredible game physics and graphical engines and with all the creative and completely fantastic titles that have been produced in the last 20 years, that game developers can still offer up a gigantic pile of turd and then have the audacity to sell it to the general public.

What is even worse is that they would do it to a franchise that has the detailed canon and history that Transformers has. I cannot believe how lame and run of the mill this game is. It's as if they think that throwing Megatron and Optimus Prime into the game will cover up the fact that the story is rubbish, as is the rest of the game.

Seriously.

And then we move into the following issues:

* Despite what character you pick, there is no real noticable difference between Megatron to Barricade to Bumblebee to Ratchet. Simply classifying the various characters as different 'classes' yet offering no noticable change in their abilities or strengths / weaknesses is like calling a red apple a strawberry due to its colour.
* The game ends up being 'Run to room, shoot all the enemies, kill boss if he exists, listen to perpetuation of horrible storyline, rinse and repeat'. There is no puzzle or difficulty in it. You just kill stuff. There's no two ways to do a situation since you're generally fighting in corridors or limited outdoor environments. The Wii version of the game is a rail-shooter; the 360 version is simply a rail shooter with some freedom on what angle you can shoot the enemy from.
* I can shoot a transformer in the leg twice with the strongest character, yet he still explodes as if I've stuffed a molotov cocktail down his thoat. Why? Did the 'people' making this atrocity not think to vary the damage effects and treat different parts of the robots as unique?
* High Moon Studio's have gone very close to, if not actually achieved, plagiarism by stealing the 'Hunter' character from Halo, turning him into a robot, and then claiming him to be a 'Stomper' or some such. Seriously guys, did you think nobody would notice? His entire left hand is a shield, same as a hunter. He can't be killed from front on, like a Hunter - He needs to be shot in the back on the 'orangey-red' backpack, like a Hunter. He simply runs at you and swipes with his gigantic shield when you get too close like a Hunter. He shoots a massive cannon on his right arm like a Hunter. He even walks and trudles like a Hunter. IF IT MOVES, BEHAVES AND IS DESIGNED LIKE A HUNTER, IT'S PROBABLY A HUNTER YOU IDIOTS!
* The continual likeness in gameplay to Halo is staggering; Either Bungie is moonlighting as High Moon Studios or there should be a law suit. I mean, you can pick up an overshield FFS. The multiplayer even has a 'Firefight', 'Assault' and 'King of the Hill' multiplayer variants.
* The ammo is few and far between, or very well hidden. I had to resort to meleeing the enemy on so many occasions because you simply can't store enough ammo. Bashing the 'melee' button 50 billion times is not as fun as it might seem.
* The Decepticons really aren't evil enough. Both Brawl and Barricade were way too 'goody-too-shoes' and Megatron simply not enough of an angry tyrant for me to seriously believe they were the bad side.
* Both the enemy and friendly AI are utterly useless. I haven't seen such shocking AI since Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. Like, seriously - That's the biggest insult I can give it. Nobody tries to use cover, the enemy simply tries to run at you in some kamikaze approach it believes will win the fight and your 'friendlies' hardly ever kill anything. I get that the game is designed to be played with friends, but when you've not got that option the computer makes you feel like you're playing with your 4 year old brother.
* None of the fights you are involved in hold any intensity to them, and in fact are very bland and completely unexciting. It was an effort to keep pushing through the boredom barrier in order to review the game.

No amount of Optimus Prime could save this game.

The list could go on but frankly I'm tired of doing so. A franchise with so much lore and history and possibility in it as Transformers has does not deserve a game like this bearing its name.

These types of games keep getting shoveled out to gamers all to often. Developers and publishers need to pull their finger out and stop making grabs for cash and start trying to produce titles worthy of spending $120. Transformers: War for Cybertron isn't worth $10.

Please don't buy this, even for you kids. It's a waste of money and a terrible game. And it's essentially supporting a really shit Halo clone by people who simply don't get that 'Transformers' and 'Halo' put together is not a 'win win' situation.

FFS, this game has made me angry. I feel like I want to go drown a puppy or something to get over my anger at the repetitive bullshit that keeps coming out onto the games market. Either that or I should send a moose head to High Moon Studio's and warn them against making any future titles.

It's no wonder Yahtzee is so bitter when he does Zero Punctuation. He has to review upchuck like this every week. It's a testament that he hasn't thrown himself off a building given this is the quality of titles coming out. I mean, IGN gave it 9/10. Activision must be shuffling some seriously big brown paper bags for a review score like that.

Pros

It has Optimus Prime in it. That is the one and only redeeming factor.

Cons

It's a repetitive, boring, unchallenging, plagiarised game obviously developed by a bunch of hack gaming developers who thought it would be fun to rip off Halo. Suprise!! People noticed you ripped off a successful franchise formula because you were too useless to come up with your own!