![]() ![]() As the level geometry gets more complicated and the game throws Michael Bay-appropriate levels of chaos at you, the framerate becomes near-unplayable. I knew it was a bad sign when the nausea-inducing framerate got me killed repeatedly only a few minutes into the relatively sparse, simple tutorial level. I don’t know how the game runs on other platforms, but on Wii U, Dark Spark is a stutter-fest. Of course, this wouldn’t be nearly as big an issue if the game had a serviceable framerate. Until you memorize the handful of repeating enemy character models there isn’t much to discern them from your allies. ![]() On more than one occasion I dumped an entire magazine into Bumblebee or Optimus Prime without realizing that the enemies had circled around behind me. Like War and Fall of Cybertron this game is at its core a third person shooter, and homogenous character design is a bad, bad thing in a shooter. This aesthetic shift also doesn’t change the fact that the Bayformers are hideous nondescript masses of pistons and sheet metal, making it really difficult to differentiate between friend and foe. It is pretty jarring, though imagine if the growly Christian Bale Batman and Tom Hardy’s Bane showed up in Arkham Knight with absolutely no explanation. This establishes an intriguing shift in setting and makes a plausible case for why the transformers look so different between the movies and, well, everything else. In the present-day level, Optimus and his buddies have the ugly, overcomplicated design from the Michael Bay flicks. In the levels that take place in the past, the transformers have the blockier, more toy-like appearance from the '80s cartoon. Confused? Don’t feel bad I’m sure even a die-hard Transformers fan would be a little perplexed.Įdge of Reality at least tries to show an interesting contrast between the old and new transformers. That is, they would, but the game quickly cuts to a period before Fall of Cybertron, where the Decepticons are trying to get the Dark Spark in the past. Peter Cullen is happily chewing the scenery as Optimus Prime, waxing poetic about how much he loves humans and how honorable they are, when the Decepticons get their hands on the Dark Spark and things go sideways. The plot kicks off with the Decepticons acquiring the Dark Spark, a super-powered MacGuffin that basically means bad news for the Autobots. ![]() Developed by Edge of Reality, it tries to co-opt many of the gameplay concepts from the previous two games by High Moon but the execution seems rushed, and the attempts to merge the continuity of the animated series and that of the Michael Bay movies just results in confusion. ![]() The latest game, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark is unfortunately a clunky mess. High Moon Studios even developed a couple of really good games based on the original series: War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron. Still, I fully acknowledge that a lot of people have very fond memories of the Transformers and hold them as dearly as I do the crew of the USS Enterprise or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I can only assume that the tiresome Michael Bay movies succeed purely on a concoction of nostalgia and explosions. I’ve never been able to take the cartoons seriously-not with utterly toyetic character names like Starscream, Soundwave and Megatron. I’m largely ambivalent toward the Transformers franchise. ![]()
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