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Expansion Pass 2 Game #07/ Blog a Day #21

Hello everyone, how are you?

Everyone had a favorite line of toys growing up. One of my favorite toys growing up was Transformers. Like I just loved the idea of robots transforming into cars, or various vehicles and whatnot. I love cars and I love robots and to me this was just the perfect combination of two things that I like. I never had any Transformers games though, the ones that were available at the time were the ones based on the live action movies, and some games were okay to meh in terms of quality. It wasn't till High Moon Studios came along that they finally gave us what I consider the two best Transformers games ever made and today we are going to take a look at one of those games. That game is Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. Autobots, Transform and Roll Out!

 

 

                                   In every war, there are calms between storms.

I've played some great Batman games on the PS3, so how about Transformers? Well I got my answer when I played War for Cybertron. I was really impressed, I had a ton of fun and was thinking of all the stuff I had missed at that point that I needed to try. After that there was an announcement that War for Cybertron was getting a sequel called Fall of Cybertron. I was really excited but I didn't buy it right away. I got it a few years later and once it was at a low enough price I bought it. So how is the game?

If you haven't played the first game, I will try my best to summarize both without spoiling much. War for Cybetron takes place in the early days of the war... for Cybetron. While Fall of Cybertron takes place during the final days of the war. In the game the war was a lost cause and Cybetron is dying. So the Autobots attempt to flee in the Ark, a giant spacecraft, but the Decepticons intercept them to prevent their escape which leads into a final battle between Optimus Prime and Megatron. From there you get a flashback to what happened 6 days prior to this climax. 

The core gameplay is the same as WfC for the most part, you can transform between robot and vehicle mode at will and I like how you can use both depending on the situation. But there has been a number of gameplay tweaks as well. Like for starters, all the playable characters in the single-player mode have their own abilities. The weapons you can use have now been expanded and you can also upgrade them as well.

 

 

                    You can either use weapons or ram your enemies in vehicle mode

The looks of the characters have been given some tweaks as well. Optimus Prime has this blocky look to him which looks pretty cool. I honestly prefer the look Optimus had in the previous game, but this design is still great. One thing I love is all the moving parts that they have when they are either in vehicle or robot form which is a nice little touch. I feel like the game is definitely among the best looking games on the PS3, it just looks incredible to me.

The game features online play as well. The online in the first game was fun, but in this game they took it to another level. Here you have the option of customizing your very own Transformer for each of the 4 classes. It's really cool creating your very own Transformer and using it to team up with other players to fight the enemy team.

"But Captain N, where can I play this?" Well sadly you are out of luck with this game. Activision lost the licensing rights to all their Transformers games in 2017 that they all had to be pulled from all digital marketplaces and any remaining copies are definitely expensive. If you can come by a cheap used copy then I highly recommend picking it up.

 

                                                 Me Grimlock use Hyper Beam!

Final Thoughts: Transformers: Fall of Cyberton is among my list of favorite licensed games, it's really good. Sometimes I feel like I like War for Cybertron more or sometimes I feel like I like Fall of Cybertron more, they are both great games. There are some things that I prefer from the first game more, but I feel like Fall of Cybetron improved upon the previous game in every way possible. What I truly love is the variety when it comes to the gameplay, which I think is much better than WfC. The voice acting performances for the characters are great as well, Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime is always a delight to hear.

It's a shame that High Moon Studios never achieved their intended vision with these games since they had originally planned it to be a trilogy. The third and most likely final game never happened since Activision sent High Moon Studios to work on the Call of Duty mines after the poor performance of Deadpool, and Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark, a Transformers game that they didn't even make. I imagine the final game they really intended to make would have most likely taken place on Earth if the ending to Fall of Cybertron is anything to go by. That would have been really cool to see, maybe the game could have been called Exodus from Cybertron or War from Cybertron.

However I imagine you have all heard that Microsoft has purchased Activision. Microsoft has gone on to say that any of the studios or teams that were forced to work on Call of Duty can work on any of the IP's of their choice from Activision's vault. High Moon Studios is among those studios so I hope these games get a second life and hopefully, just maybe, we get the true final game in the series. I mean this will all depend on Hasbro, since they are the owners of Transformers, but there is still light in that darkest hour. 

 

One day, an Autobot will rise from our ranks and use the Power of the Matrix to light our darkest hour.

You never bend, you never break. You seem to know just what it takes. You're a fighter.

Well that's all for game #07, game #6 coming soon which will mark the last game of the first half of this list. Thanks for reading and...