It’s exactly the sort of licensed game that sells big, and its release is timed to the latest movie, so why even bother trying? Edge of Reality’s talents occasionally peer around the abundant rough edges, but it’s not enough.
#Spark in the dark pc game series
This isn’t a video game it’s a series of focus test-approved bullet points, all patchworked together and painted over with geek-friendly transforming robots. That’s all on top of the various bugs and technical hiccups that result in slowdowns, stuck characters, and occasional untriggered checkpoints. Or when you reach a platforming sequence in which the space between jumps doesn’t feel quite right. It’s evident whenever you come to a difficulty spike that falls just a bit too much on the side of impossible. Worse still is the ever-present sense that Dark Spark needed more time to cook in the QA labs. There’s not even enough visual flash to justify playing this on a newer console. Even the robots, typically a highlight in these Transformers games, don’t pop with the same level of detail that they normally do. Environments consist of same-y corridors and open spaces that are replete with monster closets. If only Rise of the Dark Spark didn’t seem so bland and slapped together. Of these consumables, HACKs offer temporary XP bonuses in exchange for an assortment of difficulty tweaks (think Halo’s Skulls) and D-pad assignable TECHs act as medkits, ammo boxes, and the like. Leveling up and completing challenges rewards players with Gear Boxes, which spit out a randomized assortment of Autobots/Decepticons, weapons/weapon upgrades, and consumables. These are more focused battle spaces than anything the story mode provides, with fixed offensive/defensive emplacements that up to four players can make use of to keep the swarming enemies at bay.Īs a distillation of the campaign’s best bits – namely the combat – Escalation stands as the most entertaining hook.Edge of Reality injects a few fresh ideas. It would feel forced if it weren’t so incoherent.Ĭompetitive multiplayer is gone – bafflingly, given High Moon’s success with it in War and Fall – but the Horde-like wave-based survival of Escalation remains. An alternate history plays out from here, with a plot that spans both timelines. Lockdown, the latest movie’s big bad guy, manages to escape with the Dark Spark in his possession, and he uses its power to reach Cybertron, circa War for Cybertron. It pops up first in the film continuity, at the site of a meteor crash. The titular Dark Spark is an ancient relic from Cybertron that’s got the ability to tear open holes between dimensions. Dark Spark makes an ungainly attempt to join the two. It’s a separate continuity from the one that exists in Michael Bay’s Paramount-produced blockbusters, the latest of which – Transformers: Age of Extinction – is out now. High Moon Studios established a new series timeline inspired by the first-generation, G1 stories of the ’80s cartoon series in its War for Cybertron/ Fall of Cybertron games. The story’s blatant attempt at cross-promotion doesn’t help.
Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark has lots of issues, but none cripple it more than the underlying lack of ambition.
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