Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark review: scrap metal

Publisher Activision previously entrusted developer High Moon Studios with the Transformers license, which resulted in the excellent Transformers: War for Cybertron and Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (and we'll just pretend the mediocrity of the Transformers: Dark of the Moon game didn't happen).

The Cybertron games demonstrated a grasp of just about everything that made the idea of a Transformers game exciting — blasting and smashing giant robots with a variety of cleverly-executed weapons in third person, and all the while, shifting between vehicle and robot forms at will. By combining a good balance of risk vs. reward, proper incentives for experimentation, and good level design with a real sense of momentum, High Moon nailed it.

But High Moon's (apparently) last Transformers game released in 2012. With a new movie to tie into in Transformers: Age of Extinction, Activision has given the license to developer Edge of Reality. But that's not all that Activision handed them. Despite having (and using) all the pieces of High Moon's successful Transformers games, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark is a shuffling mess of boring levels, bad checkpoints and laughable presentation.

For no discernible reason, Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark seeks to unite the completely divergent fictions of High Moon's Cybertron universe with Michael Bay's Transformers filmic reality — ignoring the fact that the Cybertron games were repeatedly insinuated to be a potential origin story for the original animated series. Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark opens in the present day Bay universe as Transformer bounty hunter Lockdown is chasing the titular Dark Spark, a matrix that allows the user to do stuff. By which I mean anything whoever wrote or designed Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark thought might be cool at that particular moment, it seems. It can corrupt or mind control other Transformers! It can slow down time and make the user invincible! Time travel!

Lockdown snatches the Dark Spark as Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Drift look on, and then ... it's back to the Cybertron-era to explain what the Dark Spark is, and why it's such a threat.

But what this conceit feels like is an excuse — to retread, recycle and re-use as much as possible from War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron. Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark may include the most aggressive repurposing of existing assets I've ever seen in a game. Character models are lifted directly from High Moon's games. Incidental dialogue is lifted directly from High Moon's games. The interface is the same. The in-level loading icon is identical. Each level feels pieced together from bits of the Cybertron games, with the thinnest, most cursory explanations given, if they're given at all.

Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark fumbles the elements of other better games that it lifts wholesale, but it handles what little additions it makes with even less grace. "Movie" reality levels are budget-game material, all flat surfaces and stock buildings. And the few new Transformer designs to feature in Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark are an embarrassment, a barebones imitation at the complexity and sophistication of the Cybertron titles' robots.

This is a game that takes a giant robotic tyrannosaur and makes him the least interesting, most boring character — not to mention the most clearly half-assed transformation in a game full of disappointing presentation elements. The story inelegantly moves from section to section, including a chapter that ends as the Autobots get on a train (let that sink in for a moment), followed by the next chapter starting in the wreckage of said train. The game's dialogue is awful, and its attempt to ape previous games' alternating view of the Autobot/Decepticon conflict only results in a story that feels meandering and pointless.