This week the online retail shelves of the PSN and XBL stores rumbled with the button presses of shoppers as Transformer fans tug and pulled over the new Fall of Cybertron demo.
Fall of Cybertron sees the return of the legendary cast ofwise cracking, butt kicking robots as they try to piece together the remaining society that was effected by the global war on their home planet during the first game ‘War for Cybertron’.
The demo offers a nice little taster to the upcoming galactic epic that is coming our way this month but some of the problems that arose in the original game still seem to be present in this sequel.
This short outing gives you the chance to play a chapter for both the Autobots and Decepticon factions and both presenting their own unique types of gameplay features. The Autobot chapter for instance lets you take control of the legendary Bumblebee as the Decepticons decide to raid your team’s ship.
The controls are all standard fair just like the original Transformers game by High Noon Studios and with Bumble comes the high octane ground combat with the ability to transform into a plasma bursting speed racer. I will admit that the vehicle mode controls feel a lot more accessible this time around as ironically they felt clunky in the original but now manueverability is fluid and easy to do on the fly.
One thing that still bugs me though is the overall visual quality of the game. It is an incredibly dated asthetic and the Transformers games in this franchise seem to suffer from a boost in visual eye candy. A good example is the Transformers themselves who are all given a basic primary and secondary colour, there never seems to be a great amount of detail in any of main characters and it makes everything look a little washed out as if you are playing through the eyes of one of the game’s NPCs. The same can be said about the weapons that you wield which from Bumblebee’s use display a tacky gold look with no additional decals or effects added. It just seems lazy on High Moon’s part but to be honest, they have never really been able to make a good looking game with the team they have. It may be a budget thing but then again the orginal game sold gang busters, so it still makes you wonder where all that money went.
The autobot demo cuts off after the ten minute mark and you really don’t get to see much in the time you play as Bumbleebee. The same can’t be said about the Decepticon demo though which allows you to play as the aerial combatant ‘Vortex’. Vortex is a completely different type of beast compared to Bumblebee where he can change into a helicopter OR go that one step further and change into a jet fighter. This portion of the demo proves to be the most enjoyable as you zip between falling structures and play the wingman to your fellow Decepticons. The areas in this section of the demo also give you a lot of breathing space to switch between being an aerial fighter or a ground fighter and I have to admit that it gives you a feeling of “badassness” to the overall experience. Again though the demo is cut short about ten minutes into the fun and it is kind of like when you are watching an episode of something you are enjoying and then the episode just ends when things are getting good. You can say it is teasing you and getting you pumped for the upcoming release, but it would have been good to at least plat half of the level instead of just a small piece of it.
Finally you have the multiplayer in the demo. For this you are given the chance to try out the standard Team Deathmatch and the more open Conquest mode, both of which were present in the original game.
Team Deathmatch is your usual experience of gamers clambering among each other trying to get the kills in before the timer runs out but like War for Cybertron, the conquest mode is where the fun is at. Conquest sees you and your team battle for a number of key locations on the map and once you claim one of those locations you must defend it at all costs. You could say it is more akin to your Capture and Hold game type like in other games but with the added ability to be a transforming robot.
The multiplayer also gives players the choice between a number of classes like the cloaking Infilitrator or the heavy weapon wielding Destroyer class. Each role gives the player choice in how they would like to play, be it in the air or on the ground. A problem from the first game still remains here though with the maps been a little too small for aerial transformers, and you will find that you are bumping and scraping against walls and obstacles more than actually soaring through the sky.
All in all the demo was a nice taster to what Transformer fans have to look forward to in the coming weeks. Sadly though a few problems that were never fixed from the original game still remain in the overall content, and there is probably little hope that we will see it changed before release.
Transformers Fall of Cybertron will be released for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC on 24th August 2012.
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