[no review]

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(reviewed December 16 2019)

[NEW!] Age of Extinction needs a tie-in game, but nobody's got the budget for that! It's a good thing High Moon Studios left all their old stuff lying around, allowing another developer to build a whole two levels based on the movie, while making the rest of the game serve as a prequel to the events of Fall of Cybertron.

There are zero surprises to be found in this game. If you've played War For Cybertron or any of its follow-ups, you know exactly what you're getting. Third-person-shooter missions through the depths of Cybertron, blasting Insecticon and Decepticon alike, with lots of silly banter and the occasional unique setpiece. It makes no attempt to one-up any of the bombastic scenes seen in the previous games, and instead feels so middle-of-the-road it's like an adequate episode of the cartoon. The only sequences I remember were either so dodgily-designed I died on them dozen of times, or seemed tailor-made to grind repeatedly for XP.

Its only new additions are its new wave-attack multi-player mode, and an in-game lootbox that awards a random character, gun, or temporary buff for every milestone of XP. The latter is an amusing distraction, something that almost encourages you to replay levels just to complete your collection, though it is a seedy wave of gating content. The wave-attack mode is perfectly adequate, adding elements of tower defence to its arena battles and can be played alone if you so please; it's the only outlet for using those unlockable characters, so if you want to play as G1 Optimus Prime, you'll have to get acquainted with it.

Anyone else has every right to be disgusted by the game's flagrant reuse of assets, adding the bare minimum of new content to justify its outrageous £50 price tag (which is not the price I paid, mercifully). As a hopelessly-obsessed Transformers nerd though, I'll take anything. When modern games rarely explore aspects to their fullest potential, having another playground to use these characters in simply scratches an itch.

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(reviewed April 17 2019)

[NEW!] Turok goes next-gen, dropping all of Acclaim's comic book baggage for a straight-forward military shooter affair. Turok is not the title of a long lineage of warriors, but the surname of a Vin Diesel-lookin' space marine who's stranded on a terraformed planet while tracking down a nasty crime lord. Dinosaur hunting and Native American leading man aside, it's a big leap from the old franchise, and all the more forgettable for it!

It's very much a modern shooter with linear levels driven by setpieces and cutscenes, and dropping the walking armoury in favour of a swappable two-gun loadout. Where it lacks the sprawling awe of the old games, it's at least a lot harder to get lost, and all the guns have some sort of unique property. Perhaps the most unique alt-fire is the shotgun's flare, which is useless for illuminating dark spaces, but will attract dinosaurs toward it, allowing you to sic them on enemy soldiers or even against each other. It turns raptors from mild threats into personal attack dogs, and it's easily the most exciting aspect of the game... until halfway through the game when it stops working on anything bigger than a compy. Boo.

Unfortunately, for every nifty feature, there's so much else that drags it down. The default difficulty is needlessly tough; even with regenerating health you die extremely quickly, and enemies will open fire the instant you're visible to them, making it tough to assess the situation before you bite the dust. Exciting setpieces are few and far between, and there's a stench of wasted potential, with interesting foes seen only a scattering of times, or never delivering on more than cool looks. Even the new premise feels limp, lacking any exciting twists or memorable dialogue to make the soldier stuff worth engaging with - not even casting Ron Perlman as grouchy soldier-in-arms Slade does it any favours!

It's a curiosity for Turok nuts, but ultimately nothing spectacular - dinosaurs aside, other games have undoubtedly captured the jungle commando vibe a lot better, and it's impossible not to make comparisons to the older games. More guns, more levels, more dinosaurs, more gore -- even more multi-player! The online-only multi-player has since gone offline, stripping the game of any potential replay value, and there's not even cheat codes to amuse yourself.

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