Instead, this is a game about cool robots doing cool robot stuff, and hey, that’s pretty cool. Even six years later, it’s a mechanic that still looks and feels great, but with the added bonus that you don’t have to watch Bayonetta stroke herself if you dodge too many times in a row. It’s a crucial mechanic to master as early as you can because once the game decides to drop the training wheels, it significantly ramps up the challenge and you’re going to need to be able to count on your dodging abilities to get the edge in a fight. Devastation retains the heavy focus on dodging at the right time to trigger a quick moment of invulnerability where the action slows to a crawl but your character keeps fighting at the same speed. There’s less skill and fewer hair-trigger reflexes required in pulling a trigger, so the lineup of flamethrowers, grenade launchers and sniper rifles only ever felt useful to us if enemies were too far away or if we were too low on health to engage up close. Shooting an enemy at range with a dinky blaster pistol or even a machine gun is a lot less fulfilling than turning into a truck or a racecar or a robot dinosaur and slamming into that same enemy. Devastation puts more of an emphasis on guns and ranged combat than Bayonetta did, but that’s mostly to its detriment. It’s a satisfying goal to shoot for during a combo and keeps the combat from feeling like a slapdash Bayonetta reskin.īeyond that move, though, there’s not much else to separate the two games. Since Transformers can switch between humanlike and vehicle forms at will, many combos will end with a flash of blue to signal that you can unleash a vehicle attack for high damage if you tap the transform button in time.
SLAPDASH PISTOL LICENSE
Not much has changed in PlatinumGames’s formula in the six years since Bayonetta first came out, but the developer managed to build in some unique mechanics around the Transformers license that feel as natural as if they had been there from the start.
Devastation borrows heavily from the formula PlatinumGames established with Bayonetta, a character-action brawler where organic combo chains lessened the need to memorize long “dial-a-combo” input strings to pop off specific moves and last-second dodges of enemy attacks yielded short periods of slowed-down action.
With games like Bayonetta, Vanquish and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance under its belt, developer PlatinumGames has made quite the name for itself in the “balls-out action” genre, and playing Devastation , it’s easy to see why. Transformers: Devastation is everything you’d want out of a Transformers game: sick guitar riffs, sicker explosions and the ability to play as a rad robot dinosaur. Licensed games are always a mixed bag, and Transformers games in particular have only ever been passable at best, but in Devastation, the action is fresh, the drama is hot and the robots are fly. It’s a game where an enemy bursts into the scene and yells “you’re mine, Auto-jerk!” at Optimus Prime, and if that doesn’t convince you that Devastation is worth your time, there’s not much else that will. Well, the pedigree of PlatinumGames might do the trick.