Review: Transformers: Fall of Cybertron

            Licence games are generally avoided by gamers due to their bad rap for the majority of them being poorly made and rushed to market in order to cash in on the licence’s current popularity. In the past couple years though; there have been a few studios that have been taking great strides to change the cynical view we gamers have on licensed games. Among these dedicated few lies High Moon Studios. Their goal with Fall of Cybertron’s predecessor, War for Cybertron, was to make the best Transformers game to date and, as far as I am concerned, they succeeded. Now they are looking to top their previous efforts and make one of the best games of the year. So did they reach their goals or has High Moon’s ambition exceeded its grasp?

            Fall of Cybertron has made a number of changes to its campaign and perhaps the most noteworthy among them is the removal of co-op. Where War for Cybertron always allowed up to two friends to hop in and take control of your teammates, Fall of Cybertron keeps the experience very solitary. Whenever you have teammates they are only there to perform story specific tasks, not fight alongside you in a squad. The exclusion of co-op wasn’t a total loss however; as now the game has taken a much more cinematic and engaging approach to its more dramatic scenes, which wouldn’t have been possible with a group of players. These scenes, which usually consist of pressing a button or two in order to do something like say breaking free of restraints or picking up and tossing someone across a room, are cool and do a good job of transitioning you between characters whenever necessary.

            In spite of the fact that there might be a smaller degree of replayability offered because you can’t pick between three different characters for each level, the game does a great job of changing itself up along the way and keeping things fresh. Whereas before you would pick between Optimus, Bumblebee and Ratchet when starting a level and they would all be similar, just with different vehicle forms, now most of the characters you play as (and there are quite a few) feel different and unique. A part of this is due to the addition of special abilities like cloaking and what is basically a grappling hook. These abilities not only change the way you will approach combat, but they help you traverse the environment leading to different level designs and situations to fit your new character. This all really helps you inhabit the characters you are controlling, as opposed to just running around as different cool looking robot shooting other robots. For instance, even though Megatron plays exactly the same way as most of the other characters and has the same level of health, because of his main weapon and the way his levels were set up I destroyed everyone with relative ease and felt way more powerful than I did as Optimus or Jazz, which is fitting for his character.

            Fall of Cybertron is a third person shooter but don’t expect it to play like Gears of War.  There is no cover system and the guns do not offer the level of precision used to shoot under enemy shields or explode heads that is found in Gears.  In fact the only way you will really ever intentionally pull off a headshot in the game is with the sniper rifle or the Photon Burst Rifle since they are the only ones with an optical zoom to allow for that level of precision.  I don’t mean this as a knock against the game because it is fun to play in all of its modes and Gears with a Transformers skin isn’t what they were going for.  The guns are accurate but you are mostly using rockets and machine guns so you are supposed to aim for the body and if you do you will hit what you aim at.  The game’s combat is actually much closer to that of a mech game than that of the many cover based shooters to come out in recent years.

            In addition to the single player campaign there is a competitive and a cooperative multiplayer player mode. The competitive multiplayer mode consists of four different game types, all of which support up to two teams of six: Team DeathMatch, Domination, which is a team based King of the Hill type match where there are three hills that must be held to earn points, Capture the Flag and Head Hunter, where you actually collect sparks from fallen enemies rather than heads, which is both more fitting with the universe and far less creepy, and then bring them back to one of the two ever moving zones to capture them. As with a lot of multiplayer games now a days the more you play Fall of Cybertron the more experience you get, which allows you to level up and unlock new items such as weapons, perks and abilities. You also obtain credits for playing, which are separate from XP, and are used to purchase different body parts for your Transformer so that you can make it look the way you want. 

            Unfortunately the game doesn’t have any designated servers and lag has been a recurring issue in matches I’ve played. It is rarely gamebreaking, but when trying to hit people with rockets it is annoying to have enemies pop into different positions that place them just out of the blast radius.  If lag is rarely ever an issue for you than you should be pretty good, but don’t expect it to be quite as smooth as some of the more popular games on the market. Another issue is host migration where the current host just leaves, possibly from lagging out but most likely they just quit since it seems to happen more often in less even games. It seems to happen to me every few games and when it does everyone has to wait for a new host to be picked and for the game to resume. I want to say that the fact that you join ongoing lobbies rather than always starting a new match makes people more inclined to leave half way through a match because that is how they entered, but I could be wrong.

  

The cooperative mode, called Escalation, pits teams of up to four players against 15, ever more challenging, waves of enemies. There are a number of smart things in this mode that really improve the level of teamwork and increase both the challenge & intensity of the mode. First off, while there are four characters to choose from each time you start a match of Escalation they are not always the same four as there are two sets of characters for both the Decepticons & the Autobots and you don’t get to choose which of the four sets you will be using. Another is that everyone must pick a different character.  The way that these two rules go together is great because everyone has to take a different role, as each of the four characters in a set has a specific ability, and must use them together in order to succeed and because the characters change and will have different vehicles and weapons even if both characters are fulfilling the same ability, it encourages players to experiment with different roles and learn what each teammate is meant to contribute as well as change up their personal strategy. The last great addition to the Horde mode dynamic is that you only get three retrys for the entire match. You can’t just try waves over and over until you beat them, if you fail a total of four times even if it is on the 15^th wave the match is over and you must start again from one.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is a really good game and a great one for Transformers fans.  The gameplay is solid, the single player is engaging and remains fresh throughout and the multiplayer modes are fun especially if you have a couple of buddies to play with.  Unfortunately the game doesn’t support local multiplayer so your pals will need their own copy.  High Moon definitely put out the best Transformers game to date, even topping War for Cybertron, but there are a lot of awesome games on their way this Fall so unless you are a huge Transformers fan you don’t need to rush out and buy this game.

Score: 3/5

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Lastly, I want to mention that I originally posted this review on an awesome site that I started writing for called Rival Tide, so to see cool gaming articles from other writers check out their site.