News: Transformers The War for Cybertron Announced
Posted on : 09-12-2009 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Hardware: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
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In the latest issue of Game Informer, a new Transformers game has been announced. Called “The War For Cybertron” it’s being developed by High Moon Studios and appears to follow its own continuity, with new designs to follow suit (though these look moderately decent compared to the recent film monstrosities). The game will apparently be moderately standard third-person shooter fare and be available on both the PS3 and 360 (though it may receive other ports too, knowing Activision). We’ve talked about various Tranformers games before, so hiring a developer with no prior mecha game experience AND then treating said mecha as functionally comparable to human protagonists is never a good idea.
It’s not necessarily a fact that studios without Mecha experience can’t create a good Mecha game – Melbourne House has proved it with the fantastic Transformers: Armada game on PS2.
Anyway, looking forward to this installation. High Moon did a good job on Darkwatch, so this one might just be good.
Yuke’s, primarily a wrestling game company, also did an amazing job with Votoms PS2, so there’s definitely precedent for companies unknown to mecha doing a great job. The worry, I think, isn’t so much about the quality, per se, but whether the company is willing to treat mecha as mecha: whether someone high on the corporate totem pole is thinking “Gears of War, but with robots” or not.
To go with the Votoms example, if someone saw that third-person shooters with cover systems were popular and had Scopedogs hiding behind mecha-sized sandbag walls between shots, with the Armored Trooper punch serving as the risky close-range melee weapon, it could have been a good game, maybe even a great one, but it wouldn’t have been a mecha game, so much as a game that happened to have mecha.
There’s also a trend toward games that treat mecha as strictly human analogues being fairly crappy, which I’ve always attributed very unscientifically to the idea that if a company doesn’t think and plan about how a giant robot might work differently in a game environment than a human, they probably didn’t think and plan much at all so much as worry about how the hell they are going to ship a product in under six months, but this isn’t necessarily the case.
I probably should have worded the post a bit better but the issue is a dual one; in that lack of experience in the genre PLUS the flawed human protagonist approach doesn’t normally work out well.
Yuke’s functionally grounded their VOTOMS game in the mecha genre and closely followed the host work. That’s why the game played so brilliantly. Transformers games on the whole don’t do that at all and opt to treat the mecha as humans effectively. Yuke’s also learned a lot of lessons from other mecha games, something they openly admitted in various interviews. I wish I could say the same for most Western developers (as they often seem to think they’re above that somehow!).
I, personally, don’t rate the Melbourne House game on account of this. Whilst it may be pretty, it’s functionally incoherent for the most part.
http://www.ntsc-uk.com/review.php?platform=ps2&game=Transformers
“fantastic Transformers: Armada game on PS2”
lol I had to re-read what you said 3 times because I was sure I had made a mistake.
The only fanastic about that game were its graphics for the time, everything else was awful.
Cacophanus reviews nails it, the game plays like are playing as a human not mecha, and this does just not work at all, not to mention the horrible level design.
Westerns game companies dont know how to make mecha games, its that simple, that new Front Mission game will be another bomb.
It would be like a japanese studio trying to make a FPS game, its likely it would suck, and thats how I feel about western studios on mecha games.
Transfomers is due a game that does the franchise justice, however I really cant see this being it, unless they really have taken notes of other peoples failures.
Time will tell.
Remember when the Transformers used to all be different colors?
They still are, I think. We just can’t make them out, since the next generation palette only goes from “light brown” to “brownish gray.”