I rented Transformers Devastation recently. I would have wrote something about it, but between the beta review and actually playing the game, I was much happier to spend my time playing it than typing it. Originally when I heard of it I for whatever reason saw it as a Transformers game in the style of Anarchy Reigns. It was a 3rd person brawler with an emphasis on "six characters to play as" and footage of small arena brawls in a city. However as I looked deeper into it before rental, I found out it only had story and Challenge mode, and it was really short. So it was more like Metal Gear Rising with less story, and fan service to a universe I cared way less about. Not my ideal kind of game, but it was developed by Platinum and got good reviews, so a rental was necessary. Good thing I gave it a try too, because I may just call this small budget licensed game the best spectacle fighter I've ever played. Now that doesn't mean a ton from me since I'm not big into the genre, but it does me that it trumps what I've played of Madworld, DMC, God of War 1, Metal Gear Rising, and a couple others. I just love it, and... y'know what, lets turn this into a top 8 list (sorry to skimp on 10, but smaller list for smaller subject matter) of why.
8) Twin Energon Blades
I did something right at some point to be awarded with A grade Energon blades. Why is this important? Well let me describe it to you as this: Its two short swords that shoot out flaming energy as they slash at quick speed. Again that is fast slashing swords that literally shoot arcs of flaming energy out of them. I don't know why, but this stands as just one of the best weapons I've ever enjoyed using. I think at some point when I was little, for whatever reason, used to imagine up a sword that would shoot off energy arcs, and now I'm dual wielding them in a video game as top of the line material. This is truly awesome, and goes down in record as one of my favorite gaming weapons.7) Difficulty is perfect
Difficulty adjustments are rarely compelling for me to look into. Its usually too extreme whenever you go beyond normal. The game was already built pretty tough or long to bother raising it higher, or the game's higher difficulties are just cheaply made with super sponge enemies and glass health players. Of course some games do health sliders right, but its rare that it exclusively works for a compelling difficulty mode. There's rarely that game that raises the difficulty at a steady pace or with clever changes, even when examples have shown through and proven valid methods. TD admittedly doesn't do anything revolutionary, but I have to really admire the balanced path its taken, and its one of the few games that have a compelling system where I actually want to play harder difficulties.Okay so at its simplest going from easy to hard basically makes every hit hurt a lot, removes combo finisher prompts (you have to go off a visual indicator), and maybe the enemies health is increased but its mostly only noticeable with ranged weapons, meaning you really have to get in there. Its a very hard sort of hard mode, but one that feels like it justifies practice, patience, and solid execution, and it feels legitimately rewarding. Easy really is very easy, to a degree in which any moderate gamer should never see death nor need inventory items (I didn't realize they were even there until the last level). Medium makes boss fights pretty tough, and maybe you'll have to use an item boost to help you. Hard... well again its really going to keep you on your toes in every fight. Add on top the grading system for each set of fights, and its a great scoring system in which you'll be trying to master a difficulty, get a score, and when high enough proceed to try and master the rest. Its given me extra replays out of the level because I legitimately practice with the character, and feel like I'm moving up a league and able to do better, and want to see it through. It feels great.
6) Fan-service served right
Now this is a weird point to make, but I'll justify my actions later. Its because I'm really not into transformers. I feel that I probably should be, as it feels like the kind of action cartoon universe with eccentric characters forming alliances and rivalries, that I would love. I also grew up watching and enjoying the Beast Wars spin-off. However fact is, I don't know the material hardly at all within this game. I don't get the big deal with Optimus, I've never heard of SideSwipe or Wheeljack (and I still don't know if they're actually important characters or underdogs that just got to be playable), and this my first time hearing Soundwave's supposedly iconic voice. So forgive me if I'm missing something as I probably am (though considering your other modern representation is the Michael Bay films, I'm sure fans will accept this despite whatever minor shortcomings), but from an outsider's perspective this game does fan-service exceptionally well.There's the baiscs like the fact that they supposedly got all the voice actors from a show several generations old, a solid cast of characters to appear in the first place, they captured a great animation style, got everything to run smoothly, and then there's the extras. Extras like database lore reports, conversations from or on characters logged into the read-able bits, tons of concept art all categorized differently from each other, and then there's the model viewer... complete with theme music for the individual model you're viewing. Look I may not be a fan of this specific franchise, but I respect it when any developer takes this much time to get things right, and then let the player inspect secrets and pieces of the world they've been playing in. The novelty of a model viewer is small, but not brings a smile to my face every time I see one in a game... out of the three or four times I have seen one. Its a great gesture that helps bring the game and the player together to marvel at the digital universe that you paid for and love, as well as a subtle way of bragging as a developer that your work is just that good. ...and in this case, it is indeed that good.
5) The loot & crafting system
Fighters and RPG elements have gone together plenty before, but never have I seen one work in a crafting system like this. So basically you earn new weapons by playing the game and finding them or punching them out of people. Getting high grades, beating challenges, and maybe even the difficulty contributes to what loot you get. Loot comes in different weapon types, can be used by certain characters, and come with their own statistics and elements, and also host special perk effects like making your faster or your focus last longer. You can increase their stats or give them another weapon's perk by essentially fusing the weapons together. All weapon XP then becomes a part of the new weapon, however the higher level you are the more XP is required to level up and activate the stat boost. So basically you'll need two level 4 weapons to put a good dent in leveling up your level 8 energon fists. However another catch is the grade of the weapon. That weapon grade is acquired by performing better, and makes a difference in how far you can level up.Unfortunately (but in good design) a higher grade costs high money to level up, even if you're just starting to boost it to something like level 3. So you'll want to combine a lot of cheaper lesser junk parts to make into one grand weapon, and then feed that in for a huge XP boost for the same price as you would one junk weapon. Its an amazing loot system that keeps you playing, challenges you to try new things, equip a diverse loadout, and has so many measures put in place to keep you out of exploiting the system in some boring easy way. Its such an engaging system that it pretty much keeps the end-game vibe going long, long after the last level. Heck you may not have even known about some of the weapons until you beat the game, and then one incident happens in challenge mode, and then 8 more hours of gameplay are dedicated to this magically awesome weapon and your goal to max it out. Uh... yeah, see point 8 for my case of that.
4) Five characters to master
So this game has five different characters to play as: Grimlock, Optimus Prime, WheelJack, SideSwipe, and Bumblebee. The differences between some are subtle, and for others grand, but in the end they all offer something new to try and fool with. Just enough to have me wanting to beat the whole game maining in each of my favorite three. Each guy has their own exclusive weapon, their own two specials, and some starting stats and speed differences. SideSwipe was my favorite, being strong, fast, a solid ultimate special, and nice weapons. Optimus is a pretty good heavier fighter and has my favorite special attacks. Grimlock is the odd ball who turns into a dinosaur, and... well his controls are just quite different to put it simply. You kind of get the idea this point, and I'll let to figure out things on your own from here. Given the challenge mode, campaign, and ranking + looting systems, this was a great game for some character diversity, and it helped keep me hooked and playing. I regrettably barely even touched Bumblebee, so there's a whole corner of the game still left unturned. Oh yeah and I nearly forgot to mention, each character also has their own individual enhancements as progressed by the player, so you can basically make them more diverse yourself by giving them odd passive perks or by buying up their RPG style stats.
3) Challenge mode is awesome
Challenge mode is this little thing off to the side to substitute the lack of... well, anything else. There's no multiplayer, no horde mode, and despite all my compliments let me remind you the campaign is tiny. So in these circumstances a game would usually stuff in these shallow challenge arenas sometimes with weird rule sets. I'm not sure how many people actually play these, but I'm willing to guess most of the time they really don't last and just feel tacked on. In this case though there are 50 of these challenge missions, taking place under normal game arenas (thankfully not the crappy VR stuff Platinum did in MGR), and working in sync with all that you've done in the campaign (and vice versa). Basically this is the game's way of letting you basically play free-roam, just with the mechanics rather than a world. You choose between all sorts of missions and arenas, choose your character, choose your loadout, and then go at what you choose and aim to get the best ranking you can. I've literally sunk hours into this mode before I've even unlocked all the challenges, and I then had to wake myself up and go "oh yeah, there's a campaign I can replay as well." Its just so good and works so well with the game's other systems.2) One of the greatest soundtracks in gaming
As I was playing this game, one thing never left my mind. Actually scratch that, even putting the game aside one thing of it never left my mind: the music. The amazing (mostly metal driven) music just never fell short of keeping me in awe. Here's just a casual fight tune that breaks out from grunt fights. Here, give Soundwave's theme a listen... or two, or three because this one hour loop is well deserved. Then listen to the more unique electronic ark music. Its all just so amazing! The only shame is that its actually hard to look this stuff back up because most of the music is uploaded by "fight #" rather than what theme it went to or when it played. Still its worth digging through, because whenever you skip past the obvious slower parts that barely stick in the game, you get some truly amazing electronic and metal fused stuff that is just a joy to hear. So much so that I was actually picking up and playing the game for the soundtrack itself. No other game I can think of has actually made me play the game for music rather than sheer fun. This soundtrack though gets stuck into your head, and your enjoying every moment of it so much that you have to go back and beat up Soundwave or StarScream again for their theme song. Of course along the way you're enjoying every other tune that shows up, and may spend an extra minute in the ark for its theme. This soundtrack is just perfect! I've heard others say Metal Gear Rising did it better, but much in the same vein as challenge mode I tend to disagree by a strong margin. MGR did have a great soundtrack, but I wasn't totally into the slight angsty punk vibe it had going for it. Transformers replaces that with a orchestral + melodic metal tones (while retaining some electronic stuff), and its just incredible. I want to buy this soundtrack possibly more than I do the game, and as you can tell by now I really love the game.1) Everything just comes together...
Everything is typically done for a reason, and normally you'd want to make sure it all comes together right when you're designing a game. Rarely is it though that I consciously feel like every detail, every major element, and every input is coming together in such a clever way that its keeping me hooked. Transformers is one of those cased though, where I can see it and feel it, and its all so awesome in how it does that. Usually we have to be wary of games like Destiny that do this for squeezing out cash, or a straight up skinner box that wastes your time, but sometimes there's a game that's manipulating things in the name of fun like an ARPG style skinner box. Transformers is doing that kind of job, and then wraps it all up in a box that is just amazing to look at.
The music fits amazingly well with the action, the cheesy writing and dialogue, and the wide open yet re-used map lends itself to plenty of secret finding which guides you to the well crafted fan-service. Oh and the graphics fits in to create a nice 3D style cartoon that oddly suits or even improves over the slightly dated show's animation style. Meanwhile the mechanics are all perfectly tuned for a fighter, then there's a really well done challenge mode, and a diverse cast of fighters to select. However those fighters are given disposable weapons and a large supply of loot and 4 slot weapon choices. With the grading that carries over from the well made combat, you must raise the stakes and continue fighting to get better loot and new weapons. You should also be playing challenge mode for it, each of which keeps up with your score per difficulty level so that you try and unlock the best you can for each one. Finally once you start getting strong weapons, you might find yourself getting even stronger weapons, so you feed those strong weapons into your super A rank weapons, and then need to go get more strong weapons, which means more play time, which is all so much fun because you can keep trying new character, new difficulties, and the combat is so well done that its not really boring at all. Oh and did I mention you're doing this all to one of the best soundtracks ever, and (despite not being a fan of it) one of the best loved sci-fi franchises ever at a rock solid (and proven stable) 60FPS/1080p? Don't rush it though, take breaks to check out the neat lore, every character model used in the game (with music attached), and some epic art.
This game just does every single thing right to turn a 6 hour campaign into a 16+ hour action-packed treasure hunt with a great cast. Every single point I've discussed on this list works into another, and added to the entire game as a whole. I suppose its a bit of a cop-out to make that in itself a point on a short list, but I think its worth saying because of just how cleverly done the entire deal is. Whoever put this game together like this is a genius, and needs to be the director of... well, every budget small title ever made. The only other game I can think of that comes even close is Ratchet & Clank Nexus. The game isn't perfect of course, but its close enough for what it is. Its perfect enough to be my favorite in its genre, and one of the best rentals I've made in a long time.
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