Caltrops - Transformers: War for Cybertron





	[quote name="Dream Cast"]I've played approximately three hours over the course of three sessions, and completed three out of the game's ten levels. Those levels were, in order: a tech base, the tech sewers under a tech base, and another tech base. I'm not kidding about the sewers, either - they're tunnels carrying liquid Energon runoff, literally robot sewers. What those three levels translated to in gameplay terms was a series of big rooms with third-person shooting in them, connected by excessively long corridors with voice acting in them. I say excessively long, but I don't know if they were made that way for engineering reasons (it's an Unreal Engine game from 2010, and those were known as much for their walk-and-talk loading zones as their desaturated colour palettes and bulky character models) or design reasons (having giant robots that transform into cars could suggest a certain amount of commuting between firefights?). The Transformers in this game don't feel very big, relative to the gigantic unfurnished tech rooms they fight in, and instead of transforming into recognizable Earth vehicles they transform into Cybertronian bricks on wheels (or, in the case of flying Transformers, tetrahedrons with thrusters). The combat encounters in this game aren't very good. Enemies run into the room, a handful at a time, you kill them and some more run in to take their place. Repeat until someone starts voice acting and a waypoint for the next room pops up. Like Halo, you can only carry two weapons with very limited ammo (20 rounds max for a Cybertronian sniper rifle, for example). Halo used these strict restrictions to force players to think on their feet, scavenging new weapons from downed enemies and allies, or finding them stashed in strategic locations around the battlefield. But enemies in War for Cybertron don't drop weapons or ammo, allies can't be killed (they rarely seem to kill anyone else, either), and ammo is universal, meaning the only consequence for limiting it is forcing the player to scour the map for ammo crates. Which are plentiful, but also more or less the same colour and texture as every other thing in the environment, including the exploding barrels. Smash an ammo crate, pick up the ammo, and you're good to get back in the fight. The only conceivable reason for making players do any of this - especially smashing the crates - is to waste their time. You could make ammo infinite and the game would be ten percent shorter and better. The voice acting is pretty good. Peter Cullen voices Optimus Prime, and someone who isn't Frank Welker voices Megatron. Steve Blum has been at least two different guys so far, Wolverine and I'm going to say Deeper Wolverine. The graphics look like I imagine every Unreal Engine game looks from inside your computer, a bunch of exposed pipes shot through a Saving Private Ryan filter. Other games would try to dress the graphics up a bit before they got to your monitor, but Cybertron is a boring robot janitor planet so I guess the developers figured they could just leave them bare. All the guns have futuristic names and appearances so you have to pick them up before you realize "oh, it's a shotgun," or "oh, it's a machinegun, great". The guns are also kept inside nondescript crates you have to smash, which is so much worse than just sitting on the ground glowing and spinning that I don't think I could communicate it without hiding the words in spoiler tags you have to click to read, and fortunately for you I have no idea how to make those. Each level so far has ended with a boss, which is usually something I love, but these are the kind of bosses that give boss fights a bad name. They each have a scripted uninterruptable attack phase lasting X minutes, followed by a window of vulnerability allowing a proscribed amount of damage, followed by a couple more of each. You can't break into a boss's pattern and start whaling on him during his attack phase like in Devil May Cry, and you can't do enough damage to him while he's vulnerable to skip the next attack phase - for example, by saving saving a rocket launcher for that express purpose - like in Resident Evil 4. They scripted and voice acted three phases, and god damn it, you're going to sit there and enjoy all several minutes of them. Don't you like Megatron? Don't you want to hear what Megatron has to say, even if he sounds more like that guy who does The Hulk? Don't get me wrong, this seems like a functional third-person shooter. And I'm only three levels in - maybe it gets better! I know musicians usually put their best tracks at the start of an album, but if game developers were musicians they might get laid once in a while. You don't have to worry about buying this game for yourself because it got delisted last year when Activision didn't renew their Transformers licence. That's the whole reason I bought it, I was worried about missing out on something. Rest assured, reader: you're probably not missing out on anything.[/quote]