If you were to ask me why Transformers: War for Cybertron was such a fun game I don’t think I could adequately tell you. I tried in the past, but sometimes you just cannot explain what makes a game fun.

On paper, War for Cybertron was pretty average. You went from room to room blasting apart robots lit up like a character from TRON that occasionally transformed, following linear pathways to occasional boss fights or vehicle sections. Overall it was a very Quake style game with a lot of similar foes.

The same cannot be said for Fall of Cybertron. While it drops some of the cooler aspects of War for Cybertron, in particular being able to choose which of three Autobots or Decepticons to play as in a level, it has allowed High Moon Studios to build levels with a central focus on specific characters and abilities instead. This has created several levels that play differently, making better use of your selected character’s skillset.

The shooting action is mostly the same as ever. Walk into a room and blast featureless Decepticons or Autobots apart. Yet they’ve thrown in a bunch of interesting new foes into the mix based on who you’re playing as. Cliffjumper, for example, has to focus on stealth. While he has a cloaking ability that renders him invisible to your average mooks, he ends up having to face creatures capable of seeing through the disguise and sending out an alert. Once discovered these skinny scouts transform into burly mechs intent on nothing short of your destruction.

The same holds true for how they handle vehicle transformations. While some robots aren’t really given much reason to use their vehicle form (Megatron and Optimus Prime in particular), others are instead encouraged. Cliffjumper has to turn into his car form to use small passageways to sneak through checkpoints and hide from foes. Jazz has to rely on the speed of his car to escape a crumbling cavern in time whilst switching out to grapple across large gaps and crevices. Starscream must fly across different points of a base, sneaking in to perform acts of sabotage.

What really makes Fall of Cybertron shine is the commitment to the source material. This doesn’t just mean the dialogue often being cheesy and full of terrible puns, or sticking very closely to canonical material in order to avoid contradictions and plot holes. What really makes Fall of Cybertron effective as a Transformers game, and as a result a better game in general, is the treatment of its ensemble cast.

Each character has a different play style which allows them to be more memorable. War for Cybertron broke each character down to a class, making their names and personality pointless in terms of gameplay. Mechanically you were basically choosing the Car, the Truck or the Tank (and on occasion the Jet Fighter). This is not the case in Fall of Cybertron. Even characters with similar abilities, such as Cliffjumper and Starscream, are separated by their vehicle types. Even stealth kill animations are different, highlighting the personalities of each character.

This is most effective with the final level of the game. In fact, I’d say Fall of Cybertron’s final level should be an example to a lot of game developers in how to cinematically finish your game without relying on cut-scenes or drawn out boss fights. This is high praise for a game based on a licensed property, and a toy property at that.

The player jumps from character to character on both sides of the conflict. Often enough they’ll be brought in to fight a character they just played as. This not only ties together all the different play styles from the game, but it gives a sense of greater conflict. This isn’t just a small scuffle, and it’s not just like the previous levels only more difficult. In fact, it may have been easier than most of the other levels of the game. Yet it felt like the stakes were high for both sides until finally you had the choice to play as Optimus Prime or Megatron in a final brawl.

When I finished the game, it felt like I had finished the game. Typically I feel like I hit some brick wall or am rarely left with some sense of finality. A game’s final level and conclusion is very rarely satisfying and most often is only indicated by three or four achievements popping up letting me know I finished the game. Even the ending credits were more entertaining and satisfying than other titles.

When I finished War for Cybertron I had trouble recommending the game for sixty bucks. Truth told, I have trouble recommending any game for sixty bucks these days. But if you’re a fan of shooters with a solid campaign, and if you are especially a fan of Transformers, then you really ought to give Fall of Cybertron a whirl. It is a solid game that manages to pull off a variety of characters exceedingly well, and does a masterful job pulling it all together at the end.