Alert!

If you are a student or you have a job and you care about your grades or job title, then do not play Civilization V! Otherwise you will waste a lot of your time that can be used to sleep or study or work. You will find yourself playing the game from 9:30pm to 7:30am like me while the project is due in a few days.

Update: (I failed, I did it again this summer, using the time that I should be using to play other games)

Finally! Transformers: War for Cybertron Game Review

Transformers: War for Cybertron is a Third-person shooter game developed by High Moon Studios published by Activision on June 22, 2010. 

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: It has nothing to do with the 2 Transformers movies! Or the 2 Transformers games developed by Traveller's Tales and Luxoflux, which have once again proved that movie games suck!

Since I was born in 1991 in China, my only knowledge of Transformers came from my friends, the Beast War and Beast Machine cartoon series, and 1 Transformers comic that is decades ago (I believe it should be pretty collectable now in 2010). Anyway, I feel like that this is a Transformers game that a Transformers fan will want to play.

Same thing as before, I only play single player campaign. The story took place on the machine planet- Cybertron (not Earth) when Zeta Prime was still leading the Autobot. Megatron used the dark energon to corrupt the core of Cybertron but when Optimus Prime got there it was already too late and blah blah blah you probably know more than I do. The game ends at the scene of The Ark. 

So~ let’s pull out the good thing first:

1. Good Transformers design. We have all seen the robot design in the 2 Transformers movies and they got nothing or little to refer to the original Transformer design. However in this game, the robot designs are great. People in High Moon kept the characteristics or the original design as well as adding some innovative design onto the robots to make them more modern and cool. The details of the Transformers and the machine planet are all well desgined.

2. A game for the fans. The game uses the original plot and large part of the robot designs. There are more than 40 Transformers characters in the game which will definitely bring back a lot of players’ memories of Transformers. There is a new Transformers song during the credits with Transformers animations. During the game you can also hear familiar Transformers quote from the original cartoon like Optimus Prime’s “Autobots, roll out!”

3. Some cinematic levels. The level where Megatron was escaping from Omega Supreme and the level where Silverbolt, Air Raid and Jetfire were chasing the giant Trypticon that was flying to Cybertron are my favorites in the game. The stories were developing while the player was playing through the level. It made the level much more intense when you were chased by the giant Omega Supreme in real time and when you were chasing the giant Trypticon in high speed to try to destroy his jetpack.

4. Some bigger Transformers’ armors or parts will fall off as you are shooting and keep hurting them. That gives you a feeling that you are actually hurting the enemy and that you can guess at about which points I will kill the enemy. This is much better than an enemy with a huge hidden health bar that you have no idea when it is going to fall down or that if you are hurting it or not.

Unfortunately, the above are all the good thing I can find in the game. Here are some bad designs:
 
1. The car and jet high speed racing or chasing were definitely good idea. But they are short, slow and boring. In a part where you have a long highway to go chased by Decepticon jets at some point, which should be fun! But I didn’t feel the danger of the jets and there are no enemies I can fight along the way. That makes it boring though I did feel the speed of the car. In the jets level, there isn’t really any high speed chasing or fighting level. Especially when I was flying in the space, there aren’t too many stuff in the space that can reference the speed of the jet. When you encounter the enemies, you will just flow in the air and shoot them and that exactly what the AI did.

2. The sensitivity of the mouse varies when you shift among the third-person view, the sniper mode and the vehicle mode. It is less sensitive in sniper mode but more sensitive in vehicle mode (use mouse to turn).

      3. One of the worst boss fights. No matter if you are fighting the Omega Supreme or the Trypticon, it is boring stacking on formula. Once again we are fighting huge~ bosses repeating the same stack of attacks again and again. Why most of the bosses have to be giants? It just makes the target bigger and easier to be attacked. And in order to encounter this weakness, the designers decided that you can only attack 2 or 3 tiny spots on the bosses in order to hurt or kill them. That is stupid! I would rather to shoot Trypticon’s eyes to make him blind.

4. I wish when it gets to close range hand on hand fight, the High Moon people can do something like in the Batman: Arkham Asylum game, a cinematic fight animation. But instead, all we got is that everyone in the game has an ax or a stick to strike the enemies. Am I the only one that is not comfortable with Optimus’ ax? It is just like his sword in the movie but lamer. I mean, does Transformers actually use any close range weapons? You tell me Transformers fans.

5. Teammates. You got 2 and only 2 Transformers fighting alongside of you. That feels good~ but what about the others? Aren’t they going to help? I always hate games when you are the hero that fights thousands of enemies by yourself especially when you are just a normal solder like everyone else. It is good to add 2 companies with you. But in this game, it is about a huge war. Shouldn’t there be more people fighting alongside with you like what Infinity Ward did in Modern Warfare? Plus the 2 companies I had didn’t really help much, they almost never kill more than 5 enemies throughout a level, and when it gets to the boss fight, they are just status. They can’t die, and even if you do die, for example got crashed by a train like more than 5 times each, they can just respawn. I want a teammate that actually matters! They can get hurt, they can die, they can help you fight enemies (like killing an enemy sniper), and they can actually hurt the boss and maybe kill the boss. Of course they have to also be intelligent enough to take cover, not like in this game they will just stand in the middle of the kill zone and keep blind firing since they can’t dieeeeeeeee!

Transformers: War for Cybertron, it is worth playing especially for those Transformers fans. But if Crysis 2, Medal of Honor and BioShock Infinite were coming out at the same time as this game was, go get the big titles first. Transformers: War for Cybertron is a B+/A- in the reserved team of game world.