Transformers: War for Cybertron Review

Transformers: The Game

All in all, the story mode spans 10 decently-sized chapters and depending on which difficulty mode you choose it'll roughly take you about 10 hours or so to chew through. A nice little addition is the inclusion of drop-in-drop-out co-op play which supports up to three people at any one time. One strike against this mode (and indeed the game, unless I'm blind) is that there's no in-game voice chat support though.

It's not exactly rocket science to figure out what to do next or where to go thanks to the game's helpful breadcrumb trailing hints. Still, there were more than a few times where I would have liked to have made a couple of new Transformer-playing buddies and talked to them without the use of Skype or some other third-party solution. Not a deal-breaker, but just a bit lazy in my view.

But as we'd hoped for since first hearing about the project, War for Cybertron really comes into its own with its online multiplayer mode. We referenced Team Fortress 2 earlier, and really, it's like the developers know that they all play a lot of TF2 on their lunch breaks, and they all want to be able to put out a game as monumental as TF2, but yeah, they just can't. It's not a slight against High Moon at all, but we reckon they took just about as much as they could from Valve's crown jewel and applied it very competently to War for Cybertron. So, we're left with a viable class-based online affair all wrapped up in a tasty set of Transformers skins.


Multiplayer is split up comfortably into two distinct online modes. The smaller of the two is the Escalation, which nicely rips off Gears of War 2's Horde mode. If that means nothing to you, then what it all boils down to is you and whoever else joins your lobby must survive against increasingly difficult waves of enemies. Thinking about it, Escalation has more in common with Call of Duty: World at War's awesome Nazi Zombie mode. Killing the baddies grants you portions of Energon. This can then be either collectively pooled together or spent individually to heal yourself, buy ammo, unlock bigger, better guns, or even expand the gameplay arena by unlocking blast doors which lead to new areas.

It is very much a team effort and even though you'll survive for quite a number of waves as a loner, it's practically impossible to go very far through the mode unless you all band together.

The main multiplayer mode sees Call of Duty 4's original (and some might say best) XP/create a character system leak its way in and mixing rather nicely with some of Team Fortress 2's juices. That is to say; you'll have access to creating your own scout, scientist, leader and soldier classes, and then you'll be able to rack up the XP, unlock the "perks" and weapons until you reach the level cap of 25. There's a total of 100 levels, then, before you are faced with the rather daunting option of unlocking the game's "Prime Mode".


In other words: You'll play online a lot.

Luckily, there are several different modes of play which will occupy up your time, including the vanilla Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, the Code of Power (which flip-flops between offensive and defensive CTF-style play), Countdown to Extinction (grab a big bomb and blow up the opposing team's base), plus a couple of others too. Supporting up to 10 players at a time might seem a bit low, or to put it another way, a bit consoley, but those numbers actually work pretty well and wind up giving you a tight, fun online experience.

If you're still reading, then that's a great sign that you'll derive a good amount of fun from War for Cybertron. Whether we're still playing War for Cybertron in a few months time is hard to gauge for sure as it's in many ways just another third person shooter. Still, considering how poor previous Transformers games have been, Cybertron definitely offers...more than meets the eye!

Score Guide