Game - Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark (Xbox One)

Transformers: Lack of Distinction

High Moon Studio's War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron did for the Transformers video game franchise what Arkham Asylum and Arkham City did for Batman's, albeit not quite in such a commercially or critically acclaimed way: a compact, focussed first game telling a new story in a colourful, familiar universe, and a second, looser but deeper second game expanding on the same story and, come the end, setting up an interesting new direction for the series. Larger-than-life portrayals of well-known characters abound, garnished with fan-pleasing references and faithfully overwrought dialogue (it's a wonder there's any of Cybertron left with Megatron and Optimus chowing down on every bit of scenery in sight) to prop up a brand new story.

Shiny Age of Extinction Optimus lacks a little of the boxy
retro charm of Cybertron Optimus.

Now, to tie in with Michael Bay's Age of Extinction, the series falls into the hands of Edge of Reality (Because High Moon are working on the real sequel? Please?), that bridges the gap between both War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, and the 'classic' Transformers of the game and the jagged, metallic Transformers of the Bay films, positing an ancient and powerful artifact - the Dark Spark - fought over by Autobots and Decepticons on Cybertron, before falling through time and cropping up centuries later when the 'Bots and the 'Cons have relocated their fight to Earth. As a story, it fits fairly neatly between War and Fall - a few continuity errors around the Insecticons and Megatron's rebuilt body notwithstanding - but doesn't really follow on from War or particularly lead into Fall. The war rages, the Dark Spark turns up, the Dark Spark is dealt with, the war rages on. Rise of the Dark Spark, then, is the Arkham Origins of the series: a shallower, less polished prequel no-one asked for, whose main successes come from re-using the tried and tested tools of its more adept predecessors. But this comparison is a little unfair... on Arkham Origins, which at least managed to be wholly technically competent, even if its initial promise is hastily bundled aside to make room for more fanservice cameos, and it tries to get by mostly by trading on the goodwill earned by previous instalments and reusing their party tricks... wait, which game am I talking about here?

Dark Spark is not sunk by its technical issues, but it certainly springs a few leaks it could do without. Loading screens between missions are longer than those in any new-gen game this small have a right to be, and even though there are multiple opportunities to disguise the level loading with the arduous walk-and-talk sections that slow down the pace of the mission to something akin to a gaggle of elderly women walking abreast down a narrow corridor so you can't get past them, there are still plenty of times when entering a new area will briefly freeze the game as it loads in. If this weren't grating enough, the programmer who placed his miserly allotment of checkpoints before every unskippable cutscene he could find needs to be suspended by his knackers from the roof of Activision headquarters, and be constantly told he'll be released in just a few minutes. The environments in the movieverse Earth scenes are generally drab, mid X360 era-looking graphics, with less detailed, more plasticky character models to match (Finding it a bit difficult to make a good-looking game when you can't reuse High Moon's assets, eh?), and with virtually no variation from the mission structure of running down a corridor shooting enemy robots, then running out of the corridors into a large open arena and shooting enemy robots, then back into corridors again, like a succession of small cardboard boxes tied together with string.

Jazz and Optimus sneak into Kolkular with the stealth and
subtlety all Transformers are known for.

Still on the technical side, and there are some improvements. Particle effects, at least, are significantly flashier and prettier, with the explosion and fire effects, particularly (heh) those associated with Grimlock's flame breath, looking impressively pyrotechnic. Most character models are also very pretty and look at least a little shinier than they did in Fall, although there was also a strange graphics bug throughout the game that caused reflective, metallic or luminescent surfaces - guns, walls, crates and, oh, say, Optimus Prime's entire back - to become speckled and translucent, especially when in motion. Though present throughout, it appeared most pronounced in areas of purple light - wouldn't have been a problem for the chromatically varied Fall of Cybertron, but you visit a lot of Decepticon bases in Dark Spark and the 'Cons really love them some purple.

Combat is a mixed bag. Melee combat feels clumsy and underwhelming, when both lightweights like Bumblebee and enormous bruisers like Optimus Prime use the same striking animation and deal the same amount of damage, and characters' swinging arms tend to only bear a tenuous relationship to the actual effective area of their strikes. For ranged battle, by contrast, the guns all have a pleasing weight and heft to them, and their upgrade trees feel well thought-out enough that a fully-upgraded weapon is substantially stronger than its vanilla counterpart without being game-breakingly overpowered... (except for the Riot Cannon which is, as the achievement for getting 100 kills with it tells you, 'Totally OP') but then, the guns and the upgrades would feel this way, because they're exactly the same as they were in Fall of Cybertron. Exactly. The. Same. Edge of Reality hasn't even felt compelled to add a single new weapon, and this is especially painful in the uninspiring Earth sections which are in sore need of some spark of originality about them... plus, I can't believe that neither side has tried inventing a new weapon in the millennia between the two settings.

Optimus' favourite weapon, the Path Blaster, is a devastating
hand cannon that blasts Decepticreeps into scrap.

Another missed opportunity in combat comes from the total lack of any situations or set-pieces requiring you to change tactics. There's nothing like Fall's defence of Iacon with the aid of Metroplex's artillery cannons, or the Decepticons' wheeled and then airborne assault on the Autobots' energon carrier. The variety in Transformers you play is much less than previous games, with only three or four missions as Decepticons - Soundwave, Shockwave, Swindle - and most of the Autobots missions casting you as Optimus Prime, Cliffjumper or Bumblebee. Unforgivably for a Transformers game with the power of new generation consoles behind it, enemy robots do not transform, and if the enemy aren't changing their tactics or their forms, there's no real inducement for you to, either. Unlike its predecessors, Dark Spark's levels rarely give you much need to change to vehicle form. Shockwave and Jetfire's levels are large, spacious and frequently devoid of floor often enough to make flying a necessity, but land-based vehicle forms will see less use than a D&D player's bedsprings, except for one mission as Optimus which forces you to transform right at the start to drive down some tunnels towards Megatron's fortress... tunnels that will look rather familiar to anyone who played Fall of Cybertron. Hey, if they're going to reuse all these assets, I'm sure they won't begrudge me reusing this criticism. 

Grimlock's particle effects are very pretty indeed... the same
cannot be said for his poorly-textured, jagged model.

This is all the worse for the moments of genuine enjoyment and Transformer-ness that do occasionally crop up in spite of Edge of Reality's best efforts. During Jetfire's infiltration of the ruins of Trypticon, in which he comes across a secret band of Starscream's soldiers harvesting Energon, I used my jet mode's missiles to bring down the enemy air support before strafing the ground troops with rapid laser cannons, the rocket-firing soldiers falling and exploding under the hail of burning light. I then swooped low, screaming down out of the sky before transforming mid-dive, landing in the middle of the frazzled survivors and unleashing a special ability that blew them into slag, before taking up my handheld rapid-fire repeater and charging the entrenched enemy positions further along the landing platform. It was one of exceptionally few moments where I actually felt like a Transformer, and not just a colourfully armour-plated Marcus Fenix.

One very significant changes involve levelling and equipment. Instead of purchasing weapons and upgrades from Teletraan 1 terminals using mountains of your hard-earned energon shards, carefully weighing up cost and benefit and prioritising your favourite weapons, you now unlock Gear Boxes in Bronze, Silver, Gold and Prime when completing challenges, getting achievements or levelling up. They can gift you with any number of unlockables, including new weapons, weapon upgrades, online characters, TECH abilities, and special HACKs new to this game - essentially the game's version of Halo skulls, adding challenge or mutations to the campaign while increasing XP - but the fact that they're unlocked totally at random instead of deliberately purchased removes the sense of achievement from acquiring a powerful upgrade, and leaves you without the option to deliberately unlock or spec the weapons you like. To make matters worse, having to pause the game and open each box separately from the menu results in your gifts - many of which will by the later stages be duplicates that are converted into TECH abilities - flashing up one by one no matter how hard you stab A, and it's a teeth-gritting exercise in tedium.

In the final showdown, Optimus has a throw down with Lockdown

who gets knocked down and taken downtown.

Now, voice acting is where these games have always excelled, and here is no exception. Leading the cast are, of course, definitive Optimus Prime Peter Cullen and scenery-chewing Fred Tatasciore as Megatron, with the usual assortment of Nolan North, Troy Baker and Steve Blum thrown into the mix. Most of the Decepticons are growling, bellowing psychopaths, while the Autobots are pure, unfailingly heroic paragons, but the cast do a good job of differentiating between the characters and giving them each a distinct personality (something the Bay films could have learned a thing or two about), and the sniping, scolding and verbal backpedalling between Megatron, Shockwave and the wheedling, devious Starscream makes for some of the game's vocal highlights. The cast are working with a somewhat weaker script than on previous outings, with dialogue ranging from the flat to the overblown - even for ham-meisters Megatron and Optimus - and lacking much of the spark (heh) and humour of War and Fall, but the performers bring a lot of life and much-needed conviction to the otherwise fairly thin story. However, on the villain side for the movie portions, we have Lockdown, who differs so vastly - along with the rest of the Earth levels, to be honest - from his movie counterpart there scarcely seems any point in making it a tie-in at all. Not only is he not British (boo), but he acts significantly out of character as well. After acquiring the Dark Spark in the prologue, he instantly becomes a ranting megalomaniac - a Megatron-lite - obsessed with power, domination and destruction. Oh, the writers saw this for the flaw it is clearly enough to continue giving Lockdown lines expounding on his desire for profit and trying to justify his new appetite for destruction with the promise of future payment, but by a bot's actions shall ye judge him, and Lockdown exhibits none of the mercenary attitudes or professional detachment that managed the impressive feat of making a character in a Michael Bay film interesting.

Megatron, who already is a ranting megalomaniac, is not significantly altered by his acquisition of the Spark, which is in itself a problem. Megatron - here looking as spiky and shiny as he did in Fall, which is wrong because this is his post-rebuild look after being squashed by Metroplex at the beginning of that game - is supposed to be ascendant here, as the Decepticons come closer and closer to crushing the Autobots forever. Yet, within two or three disjointed missions of Megatron attaining the Dark Spark, Optimus Prime is infiltrating Kolkular, Megatron's fortress, with the intention of destroying the Spark and his old enemy at the same time. Naturally, permadeath being as welcome in this franchise as a Sex Pistols concert in St Peter's Basilica, this second objective isn't achieved, and Megatron scurries away with the usual serious but recoverable injuries to scheme another day. However, the Dark Spark fails to endow Megatron with the phenomenal cosmic power its awe-inspiring legend suggests it has, and after a fairly weedy boss fight with Megatron and some reanimated, brainwashed Transformer zombies created by the Spark, the universe-threatening MacGuffin is dispatched and summarily fired into space. Consequently, we have a plot which drags a lot in the earlier sections and then wraps everything up far too neatly and quickly towards the end, and unlike previous games there's never a sense of a wider war and higher stakes going on beyond the confines of the playable characters and their missions.

Soundwave's highly targeted form of pest control is a rare
moment of inefficiency for the logical, robotic Decepticon.

There are far too many occasions (i.e. more than one) when the game stalls you in a room and throws constantly respawning goons at you with all the predictability and ease of a pop-up shooting gallery, without any background dialogue to divert your attention, or even give any clues when the tedious onslaught might be trickling to a halt, perhaps the nadir of which is a tortuous segment as the enormous Combaticon-formed Bruticus outside the gates of Kaon, which mainly consists of waiting for your one-hit-kill AOE move to come off cooldown, using it on all enemies at one entrance, slowly lumbering over to the other entrance, and then waiting, rinsing and repeating until comatose/the level is completed, whichever comes first. Dark Spark is desperate, however, to remind you that it's a movie tie-in and the relevant sections are contractually obliged to be worse than any of the developers' original plot points on Cybertron, so the Earth-set endgame levels throw a few more respawning waves at you, with the added pleasure of Lockdown's terminally uninventive mercs taunting "Let's see what we've got" so often it probably amounts to psychological warfare.

Even thirty-foot robots drop contact lenses sometimes.

Playing as the hulking, tanky, damage-dealing damage-soak Grimlock briefly makes for a nice change of pace, as you sweep Lockdown's mercenaries aside with your mace in robot form or crumple them underfoot in your dinosaur form... exactly as it did in Fall of Cybertron. In that game, Grimlock's thunderingly powerful dinosaur form was a reward for building up enough rage to earn a limited amount of time to just go T-Rex and mess some 'Cons up. Unlike Fall of Cybertron, Grimlock's entrance here is an embarrassingly damp squib, as his dino-form crashes weakly through a gate to absolutely no soaring response from the background music, the gate bashing aside like a bendy bit of polystyrene and Grimlock unleashing a pitifully mewling roar - a textbook lesson in why not to make cutscenes in the game engine if ever there was one. Rubbing salt into the wound, he looks stunningly last-gen, and not late last-gen to boot, and his animation for transforming from dino to robot form is clunky; the moment when they simply swap from one character model to the other is painfully obvious. While it feels initially empowering to stomp mercs underfoot, it quickly becomes repetitive, and their lack of damage, combined with Grimlock's extreme resilience and execution move which restores him to full health and shields while making him invulnerable during the animation means that there's virtually no challenge in the level and a half we're given to play him in.

Drift forsakes his swords-only vow to dispatch his most hated
foe... a fuel barrel.

There's a fair amount this game does right, but it's very difficult to award points for it because Fall of Cybertron did it first, and RotDS often comes across as little more than a rushed expansion for the earlier game, hoping to earn a little more green by piggybacking on Michael Bay's latest overblown, under-brained CGI-fest, to the plot of which even the movieverse sections bear virtually no relationship to anyway other than the presence of Lockdown and the redesigned Optimus. The Cybertron-set sections of the game are fun but only serviceably so, bringing back the same - exactly the same - thrills and set-pieces of the previous games with some slightly shinier character models and better effects, though marred by a lack of spark (heh) in the dialogue and a story that somehow manages to be both paper thin and convoluted. The movie-verse segments, however, (i.e. the bits where Edge of Reality had to finally do some damn work of their own) take a noticeable dip in quality, with bland character models, blander and uglier environments, annoyingly limited enemy chatter, and weapons, gameplay and enemy models so utterly identical to those in Cybertron that you won't believe the two sections are supposed to be thousands of years apart.

Though the tried-and-tested formula of the previous games is alive and well enough to make this one of the better movie tie-in games out there, most of the good points Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark can raise in its defence are there because Fall of Cybertron, especially, used them already. The result is a game that, by general standards, is patchy but serviceable and diverting enough for a time, but by the standards of its franchise is a disappointing entry, and one that is hopefully only a stopgap before High Moon is given back the reins of the franchise into which they managed to breathe so much more life than any other developer before... or since.

4/10 - No more than meets the eye