Transformers – War for Cybertron Is a Well-Realized Game

Last week, I was logged on to “My Account” section at the official Xbox website. I always spend the last 15 minutes of my sessions in the “Upcoming Games” area. Hence, my eyes just met a familiar title: Transformers – War for Cybertron.

I quickly launched the video trailer, in hopes of seeing some newly modeled robots, but my hopes were short-lived. The in game characters are all based on the original Transformers series, and you wont be finding those movie like models of Optimus Prime or Megatron. They’re all in plain and basic cartoon series models.

However, I still went to my local retailer and bought the game, which turned out to be a huge disappointment, later on.

The story doesn’t have much to it – its your same battle among good doers and evil forces, who once used to hang out like brothers and sisters. With a number of spruced up touches, the game has been given a new look. As always, you can select either one of the morally opposed factions – The Decepticons or the AutoBots.

The campaign stretches over 10 levels of clanking and bashing, but just because that a major portion of the game involves the same old leaky corridors and junk NPC robots, you can’t drag on for a long time.

The gameplay is decent and the controls are very flexible and responsive. You can try jumping and gliding around. To make things even more interesting, this time, your ammo gets depleted rather than staying locked at the unlimited ammunition mode by default. Every single gun requires ammo, be it laser guns, heavy machine guns mounted on cars or just hand held guns.

Make sure you have your gun(s) reloaded all the time, because the reload phase is slow. The interesting but rather irritating part of the game lies in its “transformation”. You can transform your robot any time, into a vehicle or a flying machine but the game hasn’t been developed in a friendly manner that would allow you to transform from one form to another. For instance, if a mission requires a lot of shooting and running, then forget about switching to your alter form — It will only make the matters worse for you.

Thankfully, there’s a lot more to War for Cybertron, than it seems. It means that the multiplayer mode is another aspect of the game that is worth some brief exploration. Perhaps, the best part of joining an intense multiplayer session is that you can transform into a vehicle or a flying machine to wade your way across the map easily.

Sadly, the game just lacks a lot in terms of invigorating graphics, gripping gameplay and engaging cinematics. You can play it in the two player mode and that’s as far as it gets.