Transformers: War For Cybertron

From start to finish, it's obvious that this entire game is made by and for Transformers fans. It evokes the same fun feeling of the 80s cartoon while being given a certain level of quality that makes it not as easily ridiculed.

Other recent Transformers games have tried to do various things with the franchise that didn't really work. We had the first two movie games, which tried a semi-open world mission-based style. We had an older game for the PS2 that was more along the lines of adventure-shooter. War for Cybertron is a simple action-shooter, and it works brilliantly.

The primary gameplay is a 3rd-person shooter, played from an over-the-shoulder perspective. This works very well for the most part, but can get slightly annoying because the camera is set several meters to the right of the player character. Other shooters give the player the option of switching the camera between the left and right sides on the fly, but War for Cybertron does not. This makes for a problem, since there's no way to  look around a corner to your left. If you're trying to hide behind cover, you can only really step around from the right side, not the left. Fortunately, the camera shifts to a centered perspective when you click the left thumbstick and transform into vehicle ("alt") mode. The act of transforming and quickly utilizing alt mode is one of the best parts of the game, especially when using a fast-moving "scout" character like Bumblebee or a jet-based Cybertronian like Starscream or Jetfire. While past Transformers games have made alt modes feel clunky and annoying, War for Cybertron makes them feel fast and fun.

The story behind the game is pretty simple: it's a prequel to the main Transformers story, set during the war on Cybertron. Megatron has discovered the power of Dark Energon, and is using it to corrupt the planet and destroy the Autobots. The Autobots fight back, and Optimus Prime must learn to accept his role as leader of the Autobots. One very cool factor is that this game serves as the canonical prequel to the currently-running Transformers: Prime TV series. The voice cast is different (with the exception of Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime), but there are plenty of notable similarities in design and story between the two projects.

The main campaign mode is split into ten reasonably long chapters. The first five are played from the perspective of the Decepticons, while the last five belong to the Autobots. Although the chapters are arranged in chronological order from I-X, they're treated like two separate campaigns, and the player can choose to start at the Autobots' first mission in Chapter VI if they so choose. It's a nice bit of leeway.

For the most part, the Decepticons' campaign is very straightforward: Megatron and his lackeys fight their way from point A to point B, blasting everything in sight. It's enjoyable, though a little mind-numbing and repetitive. The Autobots' campaign, however, is much more interesting. It's more varied, changing things up a lot more often and throwing in a few more minor plot changes to keep things somewhat interesting. Overall, the Autobot campaign is just more fun.

The multiplayer modes are good, if somewhat generic. All the usual multiplayer shooter modes are there: Team Deathmatch, objective-based combat, etc. The really great mode, however, is called "Escalation." It's basically a survivor mode, where four players defend themselves against wave after wave of Decepticon drones. The little features of this mode—inspired, no doubt, by the Nazi Zombies mode from Call of Duty—make it extremely fun.

Looking back at the last seven paragraphs I just wrote, three of them have ended with the word "fun." And that's probably the best word to describe War for Cybertron. More than any game previously, it taps into what we all suspected would be the fun of being a Transformer and fighting in the Great War.

8/10