Game review: Transistor for PS4

I wasn’t a fan of Supergiant’s Bastion, but Transistor’s featured game mechanic of pausing time to chain together attacks was very similar to Dragon Age: Origins, and I hoped that perhaps the company might move away from the “always on” narration that drove me nuts in Bastion. To a certain extent, they did, because the eponymous sword Transistor does not actually narrate. However, he rarely shuts up, and so a frequent mantra for me while playing this was, “Will you please shut the fuck up?”

My feelings for the game aren’t helped by the fact that beyond the one nifty feature the game has, there’s very little to keep it interesting to me. The many locking arenas fill up with enemies that all look pretty much the same, and to up the challenge merely means facing the same evil robots with new upgrades. Toward the end, the game introduces an enemy called Man, and after fighting two of these, the games simply clones the same Man and makes me fight three and four of them in the same arena. It’s all very bland, and I never really felt engaged.

The story is pretty thin weaksauce. You play Red, a pop singer in the future who is attacked and somehow has her voice stolen. Her biggest fan steps in front of the Transistor sword, and he’s sucked into it and becomes the smooth, dull, droning voice that follows you through the games. What makes this premise such weaksauce is that seconds after picking up this sword, Red is wacking enemies with superpowers like she’s Corbin Dallas, and we just never got told about her extensive history as a wandering knight before she started her music career. And yeah, I know the game world could use a few more women characters, but Red’s about as bland as a glass of skim milk. Her weak story and lack of personality makes it hard enough to connect with her, but having her be the voiceless avatar makes her even less interesting. Really, the game could have been made with a man and the sword as an inanimate object, and the game would still be the same.

The graphics of the world are pretty good, and the music is too, but the enemy design is repetitive and dull, and worse, it’s all rather uninspired. I feel like I’m seeing some placeholders the art department cobbled together until they could come up with real enemies, but no, this is as good as the game gets until you face the final boss.

The game does have an interesting system for upgrading and swapping out attacks, in that each attack has a slot, and each attack can be slotted into another, or into a space as a passive ability. The relatively sad Ping attack doesn’t do anything on its own, but slotted into bigger attacks, it can reduce the casting cost, allowing you to stack other attacks. I did like that concept.

I was less enthusiastic about how the game handles failure. Instead of dying and starting over from a checkpoint, the game removes one of the attacks and gives Red a refilled health bar. The problem with this is, some enemies, like the robot dog Fetch, can quickly wipe out health and strip Red of all her attacks. At those points, I had no choice but to hit retry and go back to the last checkpoint. The game is generous enough with the save points, but honestly, I would have preferred plain old video game death over a slow death by way of tactical restriction. This is why most of the time, after losing two abilities, I just said screw it and hit retry.

Also not impressing me was the other item you can collect by leveling up, Limiters, which make the game tougher with the added reward of a miniscule amount of extra XP. I did try these out, but the risk simply isn’t worth the reward, in my opinion. When enemies like the robot dog can already strip my health without help, why am I going to use a limiter making their attacks much stronger? Yeah, no thanks.

And then there’s the ending. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but it’s very much a typical indie ending, the kind that rewards all your efforts with “You win a giant bunch of NOTHING!” And it’s kind of a depressing nothing at that, something that might irk me if I haven’t already seen it so many times with indie games. These days, I’m actually surprised when an indie game doesn’t have a lousy ending. It’s a bit like watching an old martial arts flick where the hero lives; it’s the exception rather than the rule.

The controls weren’t bad, and any mistakes I made with my fat thumb syndrome was easy to correct thanks to a back button to erase my incorrect input. But I would have liked to use the right stick to control the camera, especially in certain areas where I just needed to nudge the screen a little one way or the other to see the enemies and hit them with a long range attack.

There’s nothing that makes this game next-gen, and it could have been released on the PS3 or even the PS2 looking about the same. The control scheme doesn’t require anything more than a D-pad and the four face buttons, so it doesn’t stand out as anything special. This is the sort of game I might have rented as a kid, played for one weekend, and walked away from it without it leaving any lasting impressions. Like many modern games, once you beat it, there’s an option to go back and play it over with harder enemies and all your items remaining in your inventory. But I’m not inspired to play it again, and I can’t see coming back to it unless I was really bored. And even then, I might choose to take out Spelunky or some other game instead.

I’m giving Transistor 3 stars. It’s not a broken game, and the levels and music are pretty good. But I can’t recommend it as a must have title. It’s just something to mess around with between better games.