Review by IGN 9.0/10 “Outstanding”

I’ve never been as consistently interrupted while playing a game at the office as I was while playing through High Moon’s Transformers: War for Cybertron. I would put on headphones and play for ten or fifteen minutes, and I would suddenly feel a tingle in that weird lizard-brain proximity sense we’ve all got that says “someone is in my personal space bubble.” I’d turn around and see another IGN editor standing behind my shoulder, staring at me with pleading eyes, and I always knew what they were going to ask before they asked it: “is it good?” It’s the look of someone afraid of getting their hopes up.

Which is why I was happy to report to those asking that Transformers: War for Cybertron is actually very good. Fantastic, even. High Moon has taken a fun, fast, third person shooter foundation, crafted a well thought out transformation mechanic on top of it, and designed combat situations around that. The end result is a shooter that has an identity all its own, and leverages its license to make something very cool for fans and newcomers alike.

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Review by Kotaku

After suffering through two sub-par games based on the live-action films, do Transformers fans finally have the video game worthy of the franchise in War for Cybertron?

In 2004, developer Melbourne House and Atari gave us a glimpse at how good a Transformers game could be in the Transformers Armada-based game for the PlayStation 2. Then Michael Bay got his hands on the franchise, and both Traveller’s Tales and Luxoflux tried and failed to create compelling video games based on the two live-action films.

Now Darkwatch developer High Moon Studios takes a crack at the beloved bots, bypassing established fiction in favor of creating its own take on the early days of the Decepticon/Autobot conflict in Transformers: War for Cybertron, a third-person shooter built using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3.

Can this unique perspective breathe new life into the franchise, or is it just bad comedy?

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Review by Games Radar ’8 Great’

Transformers haven’t had the greatest track record when it comes to games. Among loads of crap, there have been a couple of serviceable-to-good titles, the most recent being last year’s Revenge of the Fallen – which, despite being approximately 263 times better that the film it was based on,  received the damning praise of “good… for a movie game.” Now Transformers: War for Cybertron is upon us, and we finally have a game that isn’t beholden to any film or modern cartoon; it’s really just based on the idea that Transformers as a concept are pretty cool, and then it just goes from there. Is this creative freedom enough to finally push the franchise to greatness?

The third-person shooter Gears of War casts a heavy shadow over the games industry, and more than a few games have taken inspiration from it. So why not this T-rated robot-shooting game? War for Cybertron has Gears’ heavy, lumbering pace, and mimics its shooting mechanics pretty well, as the automatons march through warzones and blast their fellow metal men to pieces. If you’re going to steal, sorry, pay homage to something, you may as well pay homage to the best – although it would have been better if War for Cybertron had included Gears’ amazing cover system in that homage. Instead, it’s been (barely) replaced by sporadic chunks of debris to stand behind, without any actual snap-to-cover feature.

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