The competitive multiplayer mode has been completely torn out, with only a smaller and less varied Escalation Mode remaining. Gone are the memorable setpieces and grandly staged boss fights of the previous installments. What is truly sad, however, is just how stripped down this game feels compared to the last two. The Earth stages are muddy, washed out spaces populated sparsely by uninteresting buildings, with player characters that look nowhere near as inspired as the designs Edge of Reality pinched from High Moon. At least the Cybertron environment is visually interesting. Even with the help of Sharpshot, Hardshell, and Kickback however, Dark Spark is an overwhelmingly dull experience, recycling tons of assets from the previous Cybertron games and throwing them into banal environments full of mid-90s era platforming segments, monotonous shooting sections with poor pacing, and tons of waiting around for doors to slowly open. Insecticons are awesome, and anybody who’d disagree with that sentiment is a war criminal who deserves all their writings burned. Things are somewhat acceptable while we’re on Cybertron, mostly because the Insecticons are playable and feature prominently in the plot. Characters are tossed in quickly and just as swiftly swapped out, with a plot that tries to tell several stories at once and never adequately fleshes out a single one. Something about a Decepticon analog to the Matrix of Leadership, Cybertronian mercenaries, and then Zombie Autobots because of some reasons. The story, in its desperate attempts to marry two universes that were never designed to fit together, nor have any business doing so, is complete and utter nonsense. Jarring is the perfect word to describe the Dark Spark experience. It was jarring as hell, and only got moreso once I saw recycled character models from the High Moon games appearing alongside Michael Bay’s ape-like mechanical mutants. In fact, I was quite confused when I first started playing the game and found myself in the steel chassis of a samurai robot with stereotypical Asian features, one that kept talking about honor as if that were an original sentiment. It took me a moment to even remember that’s what they were doing, since pre-release coverage of this game has been almost nil. In a move that would be utterly baffling if not for the obvious answer (money money money!), Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark seeks to uncomfortably stitch the continuity of the Cybertron games to Michael Bay’s critically despised series of movies. The result is a game that shamelessly revels in being everything War and Fall were not – cynical, lazy, and disrespectful. Of course, Activision had no intention of killing off the Cybertron license, and has now handed the IP off to one of gaming’s prominent mercenaries, Edge of Reality. Sadly, after the release of Fall of Cybertron, High Moon apparently isn’t allowed to work on Transformers games anymore, and the association has ended for one of the few companies to produce a Transformers title that respected property and fan alike. A passion project designed with a clear love of the classic Hasbro franchise, Cybertron married the original “G1” series to an all-original setting and artistic direction, producing a smart, solid, and thoroughly entertaining little adventure that rose above most cynical licensed videogames. High Moon Studios impressed this particular Generation One Transformers fan with the release of Transformers: War for Cybertron.
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