Game Review: Transformers: War for Cybertron

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

Reviewed for: Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 Also available for: Windows PC

From: High Moon Studios/Activision

ESRB Rating: Teen (violence)

Yes, "Transformers: War for Cybertron" is a tangibly better game than the two rushed-to-retail games that accompanied the two godawful "Transformers" movies released in the last three years. And yes, by having nothing to do with the movies, "Cybertron" is free to base its storyline, visual presentation and gameplay on the cartoon, which is all "Transformers" fans have wanted all along.

But "Cybertron" improves on those games like a football team improves to 8-8 a year after it finished 1-15. It's a leap in the right direction, but one still flawed in ways fan service alone can't obscure.

First, the good stuff. The storyline not only takes place within the cartoon's timeline, but is a bona fide prequel instead of some trivial side story. The playable characters - among numerous others, Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee, Starscream and Jetfire - are colorful instead of drably indistinguishable like they were in the movies, and humans have no presence whatsoever.

As with previous "Transformers" games, players can play from the perspectives of both the Autobots and the Decepticons, but in a welcome evolution, "Cybertron" merges both campaigns into a single storyline.

Previous games had players repeating the same events from both perspectives and effectively canceling out the two different endings that resulted, but "Cybertron" reaches a single, satisfying conclusion that nicely sets the table for the cartoon.

In terms of fundamentals, the news remains good. "Cybertron" looks great - colorful, but also just a little grimy - and it finds the sweet spot between making the Transformers both agile and impressively weighty. The controls are more conducive to transforming than they were in the movie games, and both the third-person shooting and vehicular controls are pleasantly responsive. "Cybertron's" environments are tighter than the movie games' wide-open levels, but they offer enough room for players to switch between forms as they please.

The problem comes when "Cybertron" tries to do anything ambitious with those mechanics... because outside of a couple of missions that incorporate air combat, it never really does. Regardless of storyline condition, practically every mission consists of killing X number of grunt enemies, moving to point Y and repeating ad nauseam until the boss fight, which usually consists of more mindless shooting with the occasional extra condition based on each boss character's attack pattern.

The moment-to-moment action is good enough to make "Cybertron" mindless fun anyway, but fighting the same grunt enemies and completing the same objectives so many times gets old long before the credits get to rolling. "Cybertron's" support for three-player online co-op livens things up somewhat, but repetition with friends is only so much better than repetition alone. (A bonus horde mode, which removes the storyline pretense and just floods the screen with enemies until you can't take it anymore, is a better, no-nonsense use the co-op function.)

For some, "Cybertron's" competitive online multiplayer (10 players) will be the star of the show, if only because it dangles a carrot in the form of attainable experience points and unlockable abilities for players who level their four classes (leader, scout, scientist, soldier) up the 100-level scale. But the actual gameplay relies on the same old game variants and feels simplistic and dated compared to more tactical shooters with similar leveling systems, and it might be too simple for persistent leveling alone to keep the community bustling.

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