Transformers: War for Cybertron – PS3 review

System:  Sony PlayStation 3

Time Spent:  ~20 hours, including multiplayer, as of 7/20/10

Modes Played:  Solo campaign (first play-through on Hard difficulty), Co-op campaign, Escalation, and Multi-player

“Autobots, roll out!” This famous line from the 1980′s smash hit, Transformers, is still muttered by old school fans and dropped frequently from the latest generation of kids today. Transformers is a name synonymous with everything we love about big machines coming to life. As a precurser to The Matrix, the Transformers embody artificial intelligence like nothing else, and comprises a foreshadowing of life as we know it being snuffed out by what amounts to machines.

It’s a rather well-known fact that movies make terrible video games and vice versa. When a movie is going to be made, the accompanying video game is farmed out to the lowest bidder. What ends up happening more often than not – with RARE exception – is that there isn’t enough time and resources to make a compelling game, so shortcuts are taken. The end result? A crap game that may or may not even follow the movie storyline with any sense of cohesion.

The last two Transformers movies were, in my opinion, fantastic. Sure, critics always have something negative to say about every movie, but I felt that they were done well despite Hollywood’s incessant need to destroy timelines, dispel history, and fudge up the characters to near unrecognizable apparitions. As well as the movies were handled, the games based on the movies were just terrible. Look up the average review score for either title, and you’ll find nothing to write home about. They were bad, but this is, again, expected. Only unwitting parents with impressionable children could fall into such a mind trap.

But High Moon Studios and Activision teamed up to bring gamers a whole new Transformers experience, titled Transformers: War for Cybertron. Hasbro stamped the title with its official seal, which means that it fits accurately within the canon of the Transformers universe. This is no movie-based game, and it’s a much better experience for it. What follows is a review of the title, albeit a tad late in coming, which I played extensively on the Sony PlayStation 3. Enjoy!

Trypticon in all its glory.

PRESENTATION

It’s tough to imagine a Transformers game that doesn’t have a lofty presentation. I mean, the robots themselves are as large as houses – some of them the size of skyscrapers – and the havoc they impose on planets is more than legendary. But in terms of War for Cybertron (herein referred to as WFC), the presentation is really spectacular in almost every way.

Cybertron is not a good place to be if you’re an alien robot who works 9-5 everyday, at least not in the setting within the game world. Since the war is planet-wide, I speculate that every being inhabiting Cybertron is affected. The scale is massive, put it that way. The battles are everywhere, sounds of war permeate every corner of every street of every city. The fact that the robots look small against the backdrop of the incredible cityscapes is a testament to how gargantuan the world is, and it’s a character in and of itself. Cybertron is aching, and you can feel that come through the game engine in a uniquely powerful way.

High Moon Studios chose to leverage the Unreal engine in WFC, a strategy common nowadays. It’s cheaper for a game developer to use a proven engine rather than develop brand new, especially when they’re trying to make a name for themselves. This strategy, as you probably guessed, has some drawbacks. For one, customization isn’t nearly as robust, and second, the Unreal engine is starting to show its age. While no game should be judged solely on its looks, the fact that this is a next-gen title competing against many other titles who are getting some kick-ass visuals out of the Xbox 360 and PS3 is a tough pill to swallow. I can’t help but scoff at the visuals. Screen-tearing, texture clipping (when parts of the polygon models clip through other polygon models; bad collision detection), jagged edges galore, low-res textures, and framerate problems all proliferate in this title.

Having said that, the game is still “pretty” because of the artistic side of the aisle. Cybertron looks great, and while it’s a metallic city with little to no color to speak of, there’s enough variety to keep every area fresh and pleasurable. Besides, you do so much fighting that you may not notice the world around you all that much. The engine chugs along and can barely keep up, but the art design is refreshing and does the Transformers universe much justice in the end. Had this been a ground-up engine development title, I think the overall presentation would’ve been near flawless.

In a rare turn of events, I’m going to report here that the sound development actually impressed me far more than the visuals. God, does this game sound amazing! Blips, whirs, buzzes, clangs, and metallic groans transport the player directly into a living, breathing Cybertron. The weapons all have unique reports, each vehicle has a unique sound quality to the throttle and boost controls, all the voice-acting is TOP NOTCH…and they got Soundwave’s voice right!!!!! Eat your heart out Michael Bay, Soundwave doesn’t sound like the voice from Inspector Gadget’s Doctor Claw!!!! It’s these little details that will have fans of the cartoon and toys jumping for joy because of the care taken to impress the core audience. This game wasn’t thrown together, it was carefully crafted.

Overall, I wasn’t thoroughly impressed with the graphical nature of WFC, but I did enjoy the art direction and audio stimulation. Cinematically, the game hits a home-run, and each cut scene is fitting and does a great job of moving the story along. Oh, and by the way, the single-player campaign will run you about 8-10 hours on Normal difficulty depending on your play style, and 10-12 on Difficult. There’s a lot to do in WFC and that’s a hint as to the type of game High Moon wanted to create for the fans. It’s a love letter, make no mistake, and we thank them for it.

SCORE: 8.5/10 – competition is tough these days, and there are much-needed improvements to the presentation. All the graphical nonsense leads to a jarring experience, though the sound and art departments do a nice job of making up the slack. The robots are all expertly designed, as well as Cyberton. It’s too bad the engine made such a mess of an otherwise gorgeous and frightening game world.

Cybertron is a paradox of beauty and violence.

STORY and CHARACTERS

I don’t want to spoil too much about the compelling story laid forth in WFC, but it’s safe to say that since this is part of the Transformers canon, the story is fleshed out well and answers a LOT of questions fans may have. How did Megatron meet Starscream? How did Optimus become a Prime? How did Bumblebee and Optimus meet? Why did the Transformers have to leave Cybertron? All of these questions are answered masterfully throughout the campaign, whether you play Solo or Co-op. And believe me, playing with friends through the story is MUCH better and loads of fun.

The players in this game are our beloved Transformers: Autobots and Decepticons, good and bad respectively. There really are no neutral parties in this war. You are either with Megatron or against him, and there are no compromises on that. Megatron is still his arrogant, power-hungry, mad self, and Optimus is still his boy scout, unwilling leader with an uncorruptible moral center. Those two personalities aside, I was surprised at how diverse the other robot personalities were; Breakdown tosses quips and hilarious jests at Megatron, while Soundwave is his typical dutiful self to the bitter end. Bumblebee is the young, eager personality ready to fight to the death defending Cybertron, while Ironhide’s wisdom tries in vain to calm Warpath’s boisterousness.

The story is told through ten chapters split into two groups. Chapters 1-5 are told through the Decepticon viewpoint, and their main goal is to corrupt Cybertron’s core with Dark Energon, a substance of legend. “I’ve heard the stories,” Optimus Prime utters during one portion of the campaign when they encounter Dark Energon. Chapters 6-10 are told through the Autobot viewpoint, and their main goal is to dismantle Megatron’s Orbital Defense Station. I won’t spoil what the Station ends up being, but it was a gratifying conclusion to a well-told and thorough story. There are a few plot holes because of the nature of this linear, yet split storyline, but nothing so glaring that it jumps out at you. At times you’ll wonder how, in the Autobot campaign, you encounter Starscream when he’s supposedly involved with Megatron around the same time. But again, it’s not bad at all, and this isn’t really a complaint so much as a factual presentation of events. The holes are small; the story is fantastic.

SCORE: 9.5/10 – a great plot that allows players to don the robot shoes of both Decepticon and Autobot alike is the most appealing part of the campaign modes. The characters are well-acted, well-scripted, and only have a few moments when annoyance shines through (Warpath can get a bit too boisterous, but that’s me). It’s damn near perfect.

A particularly nasty bug.

GAMEPLAY

Where WFC ultimately stumbles is the gameplay. It’s not the modes…there’s plenty of modes to go around. Escalation (i.e., Horde) mode pits four friends against waves of A.I. enemies of increasing difficulty. Co-op campaign allows you and random folks or friends to play the story mode together. And multi-player is rich and offers quite a bit of variety, albeit familiar and relatively unchanged from various other games. Kill, get XP, unlock stuff, level up, get stronger, repeat. It’s a winning and fun formula, and the vehicle transformations add a whole new level of challenge, but to me there aren’t enough maps. I’m sure DLC will cure that.

So setting Multi-player and Escalation aside, the gameplay in campaign mode really amounts to three things: get objective via story presentation (which is great; read above), fight through wave after wave of baddies getting to said objective, move on to next objective. Now, this is an action game, and the pace is kept frantic on purpose. But the combat is very one-dimensional. I mean, there’s not even a cover system, and if there were, the robots are so clunky and bulky that it probably wouldn’t work well anyway. This is a third-person action game, if I haven’t mentioned that already, so you see your whole robot and the gun is always in the right hand. What the hell is that? In almost every other third-person action title out there, you can click a button – usually the L3/R3 button on the PS3 controller – and switch your sight reticule from right to left. Nope, you’re stuck with the right side ALL the time in WFC, and it leads to strategic issues when trying to find cover when in a wicked firefight with Decepticons. It just makes no sense to me why High Moon would limit the player in this way. I felt like I was playing Resident Evil 5 – the developers think they can create tension by limiting the controls. No, design a better game, that’s how you create tension. Being kind, I just think the combat would’ve been better served if there were more variety, and more emphasis placed on vehicular combat. You can transform anytime you wish and use your vehicle’s powers and weapons, but the levels aren’t designed for vehicle-friendly combat AT ALL, except maybe the air combat ones. But even those are one-dimensional.

A couple more issues jumped out at me during game sessions. I was always hunting for ammo, which was so frustrating I wanted to scream. So all this technology the Transformers have, all of the emphasis placed on shooting/running/shooting by High Moon, and I get 20 friggin’ bullets in Optimus’ Ion Cannon??? Every time you get thick into the battle, you’ve got to scavange for more bullets that are only found in crates, not on dead robotic carcasses. And more powerful guns have even less starting ammo, like the Null Rifle (powerful sniper rifle). To make matters even worse and choppy, the reload speed of ALL the weapons is ridiculously slow. And with only a handful of bullets to begin with, you’re always searching for ammo and reloading, which costs you dearly in the crushing firefights.

My most frustrating moments came because of the A.I., enemy and friend alike. You play with two A.I. comrades in both the Decepticon and Autobot campaigns, but they are rarely helpful, and the A.I. is laughable most of the time. For example, when you’re fighting a big boss character, your “friends” will stand out in the open, taking bullet after bullet without going down. Conversely, they shoot and shoot and shoot at the enemy and rarely take one down for you! It’s a sleight of hand tactic that shows the novice approach to the game design by High Moon. Omega Supreme is the most powerful Autobot in the universe, so why do your two A.I. comrades stand completely out of cover getting mauled by him during the boss fight? If you do that, you get crushed almost instantly. This approach to A.I. is so basic and stupid that it makes the search for more bullets all the more frustrating. You get almost zero help, so you feel as though the entire combat system relies solely on you and your limited ammo.

In the end, WFC is a fun game to play if you love crazy action and lots of robot smashing. But the A.I. issues, stupid enemy tactics, even more stupid friendly A.I. blunders, and constant ammo hunting are frustrating enough to make you want to throw your controller through the TV screen, especially if you play the game on Hard difficulty like I did.

SCORE: 6.0/10

Bumblebee rocking his Battle Pistol.

MULTIPLAYER and OTHER MODES

Because WFC has such a large MP component, I wanted to review it separately. As of this writing, there’s only been a single patch released for the game on the PS3, and it’s not enough to fix the myriad glitches plaguing online play.

The first major problem is connection and lag. Of all the online games I’ve played on the PS3 via PSN, I’ve never experienced such lag and connection issues. The issue is so bad that online is almost unplayable, and only on slow days (non-weekends mostly) are you able to have a few matches in a row without being bombed out.

Escalation is a mode where up to four human friends take on waves of enemies. It’s frantic, fun, and satisfying to work together with others to achieve the goal – a gold trophy awaits the team who survives up to wave 15 in this mode. This mode is just like Horde mode and has basically been copied directly from other games, but at least it’s in there and doesn’t suffer the same lag that multiplayer does.

SCORE: 7.5/10 – Loads of bugs and lag plague the online experience, save Escalation Mode. Once patched or more servers are added to alleviate the problems, this should improve. It’s fun, offers vehicle combat as part of the system, and carries over tons of sub-modes like team deathmatch, point capture, and delivery objectives. Escalation mode is pretty much transported as is from other games like Gears of War and Call of Duty: World at War, but it’s a nice addition that adds some meat to the game’s online offerings.

OVERALL SCORE: 8.0 (not an average)

Transformers: War for Cybertron is a great homage game for fans of the entire Transformers canon. It contains one of the best stories in a shooter game I’ve ever played, and does a great job of characterization and laying out the action’s pace. Where the game stumbles is the game’s graphical engine and online experiences in the MP mode specifically. Too much lag and connection bombing to make it a viable go-to online game. I’ll stick with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 until WFC is fixed.