Even so, your cooperative A.I.-driven allies are at least as stupid as your worst game-playing friend, regularly charging headlong into a fight, and sometimes getting killed in inconvenient locations so you’re forced to wade in and revive them.Īudio is the expected mix of explosions and thumping action music barely audible behind the sound effects. Most of the game sees a fellow Autobot or Decepticon running at your side, leading to the reasonable assumption that cooperative play was once planned like in the original War for Cybertron, but that this time the idea was scrapped. Instead, on more than one occasion during boss fights, the opposing foe froze halfway through the fight and stood immobile as I gunned him down.
The boss encounters would have been another way to introduce more memorable named heroes and villains. It’s a shame that we don’t get more new faces drawn from the vast selection of franchise characters. Many of the playable robots are retreads of characters already fleshed out in the previous game, like Jetfire, Optimus Prime, or Soundwave. Level design and encounters are still a mess during the bulk of the campaign, including a few misguided attempts at platforming challenges and several points where checkpoints are too infrequent and set before cinematic sequences – never a good idea. Prospects improve marginally when the story abruptly jumps to the Cybertron timeline, where Edge of Reality has liberally borrowed the creatively imagined art assets from earlier games, but somehow made them look worse here than they did in 2012’s Fall of Cybertron. Balancing is shoddy at best some enemy groups are too fragile to provide a meaningful challenge, while others include enemies that hit too hard and force a restart. Enemies begin to spawn and run around in haphazard patterns that stand in for competent A.I. Metal, in particular, looks washed out and oddly reflective, which is a big problem in a game about massive robots. Bland, colorless buildings frame the environment as a poorly animated character runs forward along concrete platforms that exhibit little texture or variation. Within minutes of hitting start, you’re in the first of many wave-based fights that last too long. The first few minutes of gameplay offer an ample illustration of Rise of the Dark Spark’s most potent problems. The Transformers franchise doesn’t exactly live and die by great storytelling, so the narrative missteps could be forgiven if the action held up.
SPARK IN THE DARK GAME RELEASE DATE MOVIE
Two sections starring the movie characters bookend a larger middle section set on the Transformers’ home planet, but the occasional moments that nod to the broader lore are ruined because the fundamental crossover concept is so ill-advised. The story sees the Autobots and Decepticons competing over a MacGuffin called the Dark Spark. It’s kind of like doing a crossover episode of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica with the 2004 version. There may have been a time that this new Transformers game was planned as another installment in the Cybertron series, but has since been co-opted as a movie-tie in, even though they’re different versions of the same story. It isn’t entertaining, doesn’t remain true to either of the disparate storylines (which should never have been linked), and can’t overcome technical performance issues.
Activision and Edge of Reality have squandered the good will established by High Moon Studios’ strong Transformers Cybertron games, releasing a product that fails on several fundamental levels. Unfortunately, those emotions are anger and disappointment. To give credit where it’s due, Rise of the Dark Spark elicits some genuine emotion from this Transformers fan.
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