lolwut
Developed by Edge of Reality.
Published by ActiVision.
Released late June 2014.
Formats: PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, PC
Version played: Wii U
So. Another Transformers movie. And y'know what, after sitting through 3 of them already and getting progressively more and more pissed off with each occurrence, to the point where I firmly declared Dark of the Moon had 'killed Optimus Prime forever', I'm not wasting time and money on a cinema visit (not when I can just skim the plot summary on Wikipedia and, yep, sounds horrid). On the other hand, there's always games! High Moon's War for Cybertron was a fun third-person blaster with a too-murky art style but a lot of charm under the hood, and its sequel Fall of Cybertron lost the co-op mode but compensated nicely by giving the characters more unique abilities, playing with bigger set-pieces and coming up with more inventive, varied environments. I'd happily play a few more of those!
...that's not quite what I'm getting from Rise of the Dark Spark.
Why does Movie!Optimus always look so sad?
"I have glowing wrist-blades and turn into a truck, LIFE IS SO HARD."
You can imagine the scene in ActiVision HQ. One nervous new board member raises his hand and says, "Um, guys, there's a new one of those car robot films we've got the license for coming out soon and we don't have time to make a whole new game out of it..." Then one of the senior staff pops his head out from behind the mountain of cocaine on his desk and yells, "BAH, just copy the stuff from the last game and mix it 'round a bit, no-one'll notice!" "But-but, the last game wasn't based on a movie. It won't look right." "Call that a selling point! Throw some movie stuff in beside it and say it's a, a, whatchamacallit, 'crossover' I think. Nerds love that crap. Look how big Avengers was." On the back of such half-baked ideas are business empires formed, and careers ruined.
Plotwise, RotDS starts on Earth at some point close to the Age of Extinction movie - not having seen it I can't really say where, and certainly the plot summary made the whole thing seem so fast-paced I can't fathom where the Autobots would find the time to go on a separate little quest. Anyway, a meteor strike has stirred up activity from new non-Decepticon baddie Lockdown and his (seemingly endless) running crew, and when Optimus Prime and pals hit the scene they find Lockdown pulling something from the crater - the Dark Spark, a legendary Cybertronian artifact that closely resembles the Autobots' Matrix of Leadership. Seeing the Dark Spark sends Optimus into flashback mode, and we're sent back in time to the latter days of the war on Cybertron, where the Dark Spark was last encountered...
Megatron with the titular Darky Sparky.
Can't tell where the spiky robot ends and the spiky Macguffin begins.
If my attitude to this review seems overwhelmingly negative, I do have a reason: the aforementioned High Moon studio was basically fired from this series, and now longtime license-hustlers Edge of Reality have stepped into the gap, taking with them the game engine and all leftover assets from Fall. This isn't the first time a particular developer has had 'their' toys taken away from them, but it's galling to see it happen to a studio I had more than a little love for, and in a series I was hoping would continue more naturally.
Of course, the irritation would subside a fair amount if Edge of Reality had surprised me by making a killer game, but no, they haven't. What they've done is throw together the level furniture of Fall in slightly different configurations to build new stages that don't really feel all that new at all, craft some Earth stages that are staggeringly dull and often a pain to get around, and bring back Escalation mode for every version of the game except the one I've been playing. THANKS FOR THAT.
I don't even remember what was happening at this point.
Alright, calming down for a second...what does work? Well, the game engine's unchanged so the shooting still feels solid, and your character moves responsively but with the appropriate heft of a 20-foot pile of shifting metal plates. Ditto the available weaponry, though there are a few extras that, while not really essential, are at least harmless additions (and the 'Throwback Blaster' is delightful). Instead of purchasing weapon upgrades and support tech with credits, they're now received as pot-luck packages upon levelling up or completing secondary objectives, which works a lot better than it sounds. Whoever was responsible for script-writing manages to craft enough turns to keep the campaign moving forward for its full 14 chapters, and the returning Cybertron cast still hit the right notes. It's nice to get to play as some of the previously NPC-only types like Shockwave too, even if they don't really add any variety to proceedings. Plus, if you're as big a dork as I am for the series, the Cybertron events here do play well as a prequel to Fall.
And now back to misery. The engine may be unchanged but it needs a tune-up badly; there's crippling slowdown issues in many areas which are random, and simply unforgivable in something that is in no way pushing the hardware it's on. The recycled nature of the Cybertron environments is hard to shake, especially when you go 'inside' Trypticon and find it looks absolutely nothing like the Trypticon interiors from War but rather the facility built around its corpse in Fall. Despite that, those stages feel like a waterfall of gold dust compared to the Earth levels, which are poorly rendered and basically amount to 4 minor variations of generic urban decay plus a bunker. (sidenote: why are all the doors encountered on Earth a comfy fit for these enormous robots?) While many voice actors from previous installments return, the music has a different feel and is much less hummably memorable than Fall's. You're also forced to spend at least two chapters in control of the new samurai-influenced Autobot, Drift, and deprived of the novelty of a Ken Watanabe voice track he's terrible, a guy who has nothing to say but won't stop talking, and who can't open his mouth even once without droning about HONOUR because, you see, he's Japanese and that's all they care about, amirite.
And here's Drift, in a picture that's ALMOST showing actual gameplay!
But really, it's not the technical issues that cripple the game. It's deeper than that. RotDS fell apart in the planning stage, because while Edge of Reality may have had a plot to build the game around, what they didn't have was an eye for level design and pacing. That's really what made the High Moon games work - it wasn't just 'good shooting', it was balancing the shooting with set-pieces and slightly different gameplay styles, and generally remembering how downtime works to give the players a chance to collect their bearings and think about what just happened. Yes, there's plenty of straight firefights across War and Fall, but it's the stuff that happens in-between that stands out. Playing as Megatron in Fall by itself is not special, but the preceding sequence of Soundwave 'resurrecting' his boss, then stomping through a prison complex while caged Autobots whisper "By Primus, he's BACK!" like you're the Devil freshly crawled out of Hell is what makes that chapter become so much more than just you as a pointy-shouldered guy shooting goons in an enclosed space. RotDS doesn't get this. There's no emphasis placed on the importance of what you're doing from point to point; you simply fight, move on, fight some more, repeat. The plot is delivered through radio chatter and the occasional uninteresting cutscene but it never seems to tie in solidly with what you're doing, which is invariably 'boring firefight that goes on just long enough to not be fun'.
Here's a better, more direct example: Bruticus, the Combaticons' combined gestalt form, is in both Fall and RotDS. He plays the same in both; a behemoth with 10 times the health points of other characters, vastly stronger melee strikes, limited long-range attacks and slow, plodding movements. Both times you control him in Fall, you're on the warpath, pushing forwards through enemy lines with a clear goal in sight. Some of the enemies along the way might sneak past your madly swinging arms, but who cares? None of them can hurt you enough to give you pause. You just keep trucking on through. In RotDS, Bruticus' sole player time sees him tasked with keeping an Autobot assault force back from a massive gate, and even though the big lad controls and feels the same, it's the wrong environment for him. Now he's stuck being forced to make sure none of the enemies get by, which means responding to their every thrust of offense, which in turn means dragging Bruticus' clunky metal arse from one side of a courtyard to the other, over and over again, and in many cases just standing around waiting for the next wave of enemies to appear. He's gone from being a steel rhinoceros ploughing through bridges like they're made of balsa wood to a bloke attacking a beehive with a can of bugspray, forever running in circles and flailing at the little stinging things that never stop coming. If the whole point of playing as Bruticus is to enjoy the power trip, why did Edge of Reality make it such a chore?
New baddie Lockdown, distinguished by his beautiful green eyes
and missing nose.
It all wraps up with a too-long, uninspired boss fight and a villain gambit that, confusingly, doesn't actually require the use of the Dark Spark even slightly, and one of those quasi-philosophical Optimus monologues the Bayformers are so fond of abusing, and then you are left with nothing, nothing but the ashes of what was once a promising series and may never be so again. There may have been a spark of creativity or life somewhere within this hollow shell, once, but ActiVision's demands and Edge of Reality's incompetence have snuffed it out, leaving us with a machine that responds but doesn't understand, a Headmaster without a head. 3 out of 10 out of generosity and 'oh hey, a playable Insecticon'.
Seen here: Sir Not Appearing On This Console-Tron
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