Oh, how it pains me to say this. If you felt you could have waited an eternity to get around to playing Fall of Cybertron, War For Cybertron or Devastation, that trypticon of broadly well-received, Activision-published Transformers third-person shooters, I’ve got bad news.

Here’s a hint: they’ve been removed from Steam, plus all other digital marketplaces – as have subsequent and worse sequels. This is bad comedy. (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

A hyper-kinetic, 80s animation-styled Transformers brawler was the entirely obvious thing to do, in hindsight. It’s just that no-one thought to do it until recently. Whatever boring old men who read comics in the 80s (hello) might think, the popular concept of Transformers is nothing more than big huge robots twatting each other in the face, so Devastation taking that to the extreme was only sensible. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Most Transformers games are awful, which isn’t enormously surprising given we’re talking about annual shooty-bang ties-in for bottomlessly stupid movies based on a toyline from the 1980s. But said toyline did inspire some excellent comics – including the current More Than Meets The Eye – so it’s not a given that retro-geek nostalgia about giant shapeshifting robots has to be appalling. Until this year’s cel-shaded brawler Devastation, Fall of Cybertron was about as good as got it (at least on PC – the old PS2 Transformers: Armada is extremely ambitious), in part because it embraced lore and classic characters in a way that earlier games hadn’t, but mostly because it managed a sense of scale. This last is particularly suprising given that FOC was not set on Earth and did not feature any tiny squishy humans to contrast against the Cybertronians’ immense scale. … [visit site to read more]

Transformers: Devastation [official site] is a third-persion brawler’n’shooter from Platinum Games, they of Bayonetta fame, and concerns itself with Optimus Prime and a few Autobot chums kicking seven bells out of Megatron and his cronies. Heavily styled after the 80s cartoon and toys, is this empty nostalgia or a deft blend of past and present?>

The little boy in me is overjoyed. The somewhat grown-up, discerning games-player in me is not unhappy either.

… [visit site to read more]