Transformers: Devastation Review

And that naturally leads us onto the weapon system. In a radical and (if I'm honest) kind of perplexing shift for Platinum, weapons are part of an unexpectedly fleshed-out loot structure, complete with rarity tiers, ranks, levels, stats, special attributes, and of all things, a basic crafting system. It's not as incongruous a feature as it might initially sound, since weapon drops are used to good effect as incentive rewards for exploring and polishing off side-missions - which, let's face it, beats the trousers off getting an S-rank and a “Sideswipe is a talented student but he needs to watch his attitude” on your end-of-chapter report card - but the actual implementation is a roaring tyre fire of bad ideas. You can't simply pick up a weapon, run a practiced eye over it and decide right there whether or not it's worth keeping; you just have to accrue them mindlessly until you get a chance to return to your Autobot base and have them all 'identified' at once. One would assume this was done so that players didn't have to call off the fight every thirty seconds to manage their inventory - the nail in the coffin for countless otherwise-good RPGs - but all it does is ball all this management up until the moment of identification, at which point you'll discover that your haul is almost entirely composed of duplicates, mundane stocking-fillers, and marginally worse versions of the weapon you're already using.

Now look, I've had some unkind things to say about Diablo-likes before, but most of them at least acknowledge, on some level, that it's in their best interests to make the business of organizing your hoard as quick and painless as possible. Torchlight 2 had the dog acting as a merchant courier, for instance, and many modern variants of the loot-em-up have slick interfaces designed to maximize efficiency. Transformers: Devastation, by comparison, makes it about as quick and painless as cleaning out your nasal cavity with a length of barbed wire. Bookending every few brawls with an extensive categorization session was the first mistake, followed closely by having to individually sell or combine every last piece of cruft - through a clunky menu system, no less - to stop your in-tray comically piling up like that of an overburdened The Far Side cubicle worker. Unless you're aiming to eke out every last breadcrumb of damage from your arsenal, the difference in stats hardly seems to matter, and of the minuscule number of weapons that actually have unique gameplay effects, almost all of them just get handed to you at the ends of various chapters.

Is that a good enough segue to bring us to the length of the game? One bit of hubbub that even I could not avoid, half a mile below sea level in my isolated bias-ray-proof reviewing bunker, was that Devastation was allegedly four hours long, which - even if you think people whining that a perfectly good game didn't distract them from their miserable lives for long enough is just the most insufferable thing - sounds a bit on the insubstantial side for seventy of my precious Australian dollars. There's probably some truth to this; I wouldn't be surprised, for instance, to find that there's four hours' worth of unique content in the game, and if you just blast through the campaign once, leaping straight from mission to mission, then that's all you get out of it. If you play it as I did - taking time to explore, doing one or two side-missions, restarting encounters several times because you're a fumble-fingered buffoon whose grossly inflated ego won't let them get less than a B-rank - then that time easily doubles. And let's face it, if you're that worried about getting enough dude-punching mileage out of your game about punching dudes, the challenge missions and two extra difficulty modes will probably keep you preoccupied until the heat death of the sun, you nutter. Part of the fun of Platinum's games has always been learning all the subtle ins and outs of the combat system, and trust me when I say that unless you are extraordinarily perceptive - or consult outside resources, like cheating scum - that's not going to happen in a single playthrough anyway.

So no, I wouldn't say the game has a problem with brevity. It might, however, have a problem with the clone-stamp tool; there's a very distinct sense, even in just the main campaign, of Devastation struggling to keep things varied enough. There's no chance of the combat getting old, not when it's so corset-tight that a handful of swapped enemies can totally change the feel of an encounter, but everything else about the game feels kind of stretched. Most of the bosses come back for seconds, often with relatively minor changes like “fight this guy again but inside a celestial tumble-dryer” or “fight these two again but at the same time”, which seems uncharacteristically frugal for a game with the freedom to dip its fingers into the Transformers IP whenever it likes. You only get two environments: an urban sprawl and a Cybertronian spaceship, and while I'm not too fussed that there isn't a third - the “robots in disguise” thing probably rings somewhat hollow if you're in the desert and the only piece of chrome for several hundred miles is your own chestplate - it'd be nice if they both didn't consist almost entirely of handfuls of generic assets copy-pasted ad infinitum.

Transformers: Devastation is a strange change of approach for Platinum; more restrained, more unfocused, more experimental. That's not to say that their magic touch isn't still there - on the contrary, you can see numerous facets of it drawing on their previous successes - but the design decisions on its fresh components feel a lot more hit-and-miss than usual. It's the studio's prog album, if you like music metaphors; an attempt to dip into unfamiliar waters while they're able to get away with it, full of bits that don't make sense or work particularly well, but still made worthwhile as a whole by a few really good tracks. Think of it in Platinum's lineup as you would Dark Souls II: a game that would be frankly brilliant were it not for the standards set by its predecessors. But hey, what's the standard for Transformers games?