Cybertron has been peaceful for generations, until pride and a lust for power divided the natives, now it is time to go back to the roots of how these famous enemies came to hate each other in the first place. Being a prequel, to any Transformers story that has come before means you do not have to be a fan to understand the story or enjoy the game as a whole.
I have grown up with these guys playing with the di cast metal toys with my brothers trying to transform my bots as quickly as possible,all while making the best transforming noise I could muster. Swooping down and attacking my brothers Autobots from the sky with my Starscream jet. Now I play it all out again on screen and all those memories come flooding back ,but this time i get to create my own bot and take control of my favourites to fight it out online with players around the world who have taken the place of my brother and the transforming noise is made for me thanks to some much more realistic sound effects.
Like me Fans of the robots in disguise will love this game because the plot adds more to the canon/lore, going into previously untouched territory. Back to the roots of how these famous enemies the Autobots and Decepticons. Megatron with the reluctant help of Starscream takes control of dark Energon. This starts their rocky allegiance and the love/hate relationship fans have come to know.giving him the edge eventually leading him to the omega key that unlocks the core of Cybertron and to hopefully take control of the Transformers home world. This is a time when Bumble Bee could actually talk without the help of a radio and Optimus Prime was purely known as Optimus. Here we follow the red and blue leader in his rise to destiny as the leader of the good guys.
There are ten chapters in the single player campaign half of these are played from the Decepticons perspective and the other half the Autobots. Both ends of the campaign are interesting with intense fighting, nonstop metal on metal action and some superb boss fights. Each mission gives a selection of different types of characters to play and the games AI provides good support controlling the rest of your team. intense fighting, non stop metal on metal action and sometimes superb, other times tedious (but still fun) boss fights. I really enjoyed transforming mid air or after getting some speed up in vehicle form just to see how the character would perform differently.
The controls are not hard to learn and transforming is simply done with the click of the left analog stick. There is some impressive arsenal as well being able to pick up weapons and dismount turret guns, but even without a weapon the melee attacks still packed a decent punch and reflected the strength behind these powerful machines. The robots seem have real weight as well, so for e.g. there was noticeably more rumble in the controllers vibration and camera shake when landing from a high jump compared to smaller drops, and it was intricacies like this that made it that little bit more enjoyable.
The competitive and coop multiplayer campaign means that the transforming doesn’t have to end and it includes the aforementioned create your own Transformer customisation tool. There is also an additional mode called escalation-play, this is an endurance survival mode of sorts that can also be played with friends online.
The landscapes, backgrounds and setting of the purely machine/cybernetic world of Cybertron is brilliantly realised and brings forth everything I had imagined it as a child. The game play doesn't really bleed originality and some of the AI is not what you would call intelligent, but it will put faith back into the non believers that a decent transformers game couldn't be made, although personally i liked the last game. If you were to take away the nostalgia of the transformers cool factor and maybe even replace them with Machine Men (gasp, horror, rip off) there is still a perfectly good 3rd person action game at its cybernetic core.
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With the recent successes of Xbox's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, even Hasbro wants to see the classic Transformers games come to Game Pass.
C'mon MS find those games on whatever hard drive they're hidden on.
There's a few transformers games from Activision I missed out or didn't finish. Would love to come back to them at some point if they appear on GP.
“Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building. When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating.”
By Unicron’s beard, find them! 😳
Does Activision still have the rights? I thought they lost them, and that was why the Cybertron games left stores.
I didn't really look into it at the time.
I thought so too, but these quotes come directly from the Hasbro panel. It seems Hasbro is willing and able to work with them again. At least in a retro capacity.
"Does Activision still have the rights?"
They do not.
"I thought they lost them, and that was why the Cybertron games left stores."
This is correct. I dunno if MS can/ would go back to Hasbro and try and negotiate a new deal.
But even if they could I doubt they would, same with Spider-Man.
Neil writes - "Granted, it was fully expected to contain rather poor deals in comparison to last week’s Spring Sale, but I’m not sure anyone expected it to be so lacking in both quality and quantity. But hey, there has to be at least one decent deal in place for Xbox One and Xbox 360 owners to grab doesn’t there?"
The success of War for Cybertron enabled Activision and Hasbro to greenlight a sequel, called Fall of Cybertron. Fall of Cybertron takes place after War for Cybertron and focuses on the destruction of the Autobots homeworld, which eventually ties the series into the animated series. How does the game stack up to the rest of the games in the series and the 1980s cartoons? Will die hard Transformers fans feel like a game finally has embodied all that is Transformers?
Not shocked that this game's story is better than anything Explosion Bay created on the big screen.
These games would have made great movie adaptations.
