Ladies and gentlemen, I have a weakness. While I typically endorse games to be nothing less than pure ograsmic excellence, there are occasions where I will settle for average so-so every day fluff. I am a geek, and thus I am vulnerable to what is called “fan-service”.

If you create a Transformers game based on the first generation characters and manage to make it play well enough, I will love you for it. This is one way in which you can service me as a fan.

It comes as a bit of shame that I gave money to the outrageous organization now known as Activision, a company which, for all intents and purposes, should have been just as doomed as Acclaim and Midway. Yet at some point Activision saw the coming change, the new tide rolling in and the wind blowing from the north. They saw the signs and adapted, and now they are run by the largest gaping rectum the world has ever known. Yet just as every once in a while a baby will offer shiny pennies from their posterior, so Activision can manage to offer up shiny gems.

After a long line of God awful movie tie-ins, Activision gave the green light for High Moon studios to tie back to the original Transformers franchise with a bit of that modern “aren’t we so gritty” look and feel. The end result is a sort of combination of Gears of War meets Tron. Some will dig it, some will hate it, but hey, it’s better than Michael Bay’s vision of Hasbro’s toys. Unfortunately this does have a negative impact on the level design.

Yeah, remember how everyone was bitching about how games were all starting to look brown and grey? Well when you’re making a robot planet completely made of metal, it turns out you are pretty limited in your visualization options. You’re not really going to have a snow and ice level followed by a sprawling plains or forest level, which is then followed by the fire and volcanoes stage. You got metal, more metal, and finally more metal than Gigantour could ever muster. As a result the best way to keep the levels varied is through small nuances in their appearance and play style as well as colors. Half of the levels are heavy in reds and browns while the other half are full of blue and purple.

Yet that doesn’t mean the maps are repetitive or boring. While it will be hard to recall too many rooms as being amazing areas to fight, there are a few that stand out due to what’s going on in the background. Some maps have holograms chattering away while others have assembly line machinery moving and pressing together. You definitely get the feeling that Cybertron is not only a planet full of life, but a planet that itself is alive. It is a shame there aren’t really any puzzles or larger level segments that take advantage of this fact, instead focusing on combat to keep the pace of the game. This goes as far as using the environment for a few boss fights, and while these encounters are the most difficult they tend to be the most enjoyable. Fighting the likes of StarScream and SoundWave is alright, but tackling the larger foes that require the player to know when to transform and when to switch to robot mode is perhaps the greatest fun of all.

Which is where the game truly shines. The robot combat tends to be your typical shooter fare, with machine guns and shotguns and sniper rifles of varying sorts. Yet what makes the real difference is being able to transform into a robot. Many of the environments are spread wide open offering a lot of room so you can use your vehicle weapon if need be, or more commonly to swiftly flee a battle or even charge into one. The flight levels in particular are the most enjoyable, and the transition between robot movement and vehicle movement is fluid and consistent.

In truth, however, the game counts on you playing with your friends. The single-player adventure is well enough, and experienced shooter fans may want to give it a stab on the Hard difficulty if they are going solo, yet playing with one or two other people bring out the full experience. Each character has their own secondary abilities that are dedicated to offense damage, buffing or defensive maneuvers. When matched together the group becomes an unstoppable force of destruction. It’s a co-op shooter with a hint of class play. This additionally works out well for the four-player survival mode Escalation, which is truly an endurance test for players. Whereas games like Gears of War 2 and Halo ODST designed their modes to challenge but not murder players, Escalation is downright impossible to survive with one or two players. Being able to get through a dozen waves with a full team is a trial by fire. To add, while the number of available maps are few, they gradually open up to more and more sections as time passes on, keeping them from being as repetitive in the long run as similar game modes.

The enemies aren’t any smarter and the weapons no more clever than your standard shooter title, but Transformers still manages to have some good gameplay and has a co-op experience about as fun as the original Halo had managed to be. It’s the sort of pick-up-and-play game that seems to have been lost in endless piles of complex titles all trying to be the next innovative epic. High Moon Studios knows what they were going for. They didn’t even bother with full on tutorial maps. The first few minutes of a level teach you the controls and then toss you into the fire with no frying pan in sight. It’s all about the action and combat.

As such, the story is…what it is. Even if you’re a fan of the series it’s pretty standard fare, and only Peter Cullen’s voice as Optimus Prime brings back any sense of nostalgia. It feels as if half the voices are done by Steve Blum trying to impersonate his own Oghren performance. Bumblebee, StarScream and SoundWave are a few of the robots that really feel appropriate and in any way similar to the original. At the same time, while the robots chosen are decent, an absence of old favorites like Cliffchopper, Jazz and any meaningful presence of Shockwave outside of a GameStop pre-order seems peculiar.

Nonetheless, the game itself is good and the characters that are there are done well. Transformers: War for Cybertron feels like the game I’ve always wanted to play for the franchise, and I hope that High Moon enjoys enough success from it that they can expand their own interpretation of the universe into more games and stories. In fact, since this is Activision it’s hard to imagine we won’t be getting more Transformers games. Yet will they be handled by the same developer and with the same spirit? Or will they drive High Moon from having passion for the project to nothing but hatred and disgust?

At the very least, we were able to get one good Transformers game out of the deal.

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