Transformers: War for Cybertron covers the events leading up to the classic animated TV series' start. This is the civil war between the Autobots and the Decepticons that led to their space voyage and eventual crash landing on Earth. The game is broken up into ten different chapters and shows the events leading up to the
Transformers' exodus from Cybertron.
The first half of the game gives you control over the Decepticons as they try for one last push to grant Megatron the power he needs to take full control of the planet. His goal is to hunt down what is called dark energon. This mythical substance introduces him to Starscream, the guardian set on the space station to keep the energon variant safe. When Megatron finally gets his hooks on the substance, Starscream, of course, switches sides and decides to join the Decepticons, a betrayal that is merely the first in a long line for the Transformer.
The Autobot story starts off after the events of the Decepticon campaign and lets you control characters like Optimus, Bumblebee and Ironhide as you recruit new Autobots for the fight and hope to stop the evil that Megatron has started in the Cybertron core. Interestingly enough, while there is a definite order to the game's story, you can start each side's campaign at any point.
Besides the massive single player campaign War for Cybertron presents, there are also quite a few online modes as well. For one, you can play with two other friends in Co-Op mode and trudge your way through the levels in a much more coordinated method than the friendly A.I.'s present.
Outside of Co-Op, the game includes standard modes like Deathmatch (Team or Free-for-All), territory-based games like Conquest and King of the Hill, as well as a mode called Escalation that feels more like a survival mode than anything else. In this game style, you and your teammates are forced to fight off endless waves of enemy characters until you are down for the count. The biggest problem with the game's multiplayer, though, is the lack of players. Maybe most of the people who've bought this game prefer the console versions, or they are just staying offline, but I was rarely able to get a match going, and, unfortunately, there were several of those matches that had technical issues.
As for other technical issues, I did notice a few problems with how the game ran on my rig. I will say that Transformers: War for Cybertron is the first real test my newly-reworked machine has been put to, and for the most part, everything went well. As well it should, since I am well above the listed minimum system requirements. In fact, the only real issues I found involved the pre-rendered videos. There seemed to be some choppy framerates and even a bit of artifacting while the game played these clips. I'm not sure what was going on there, but it wasn't pretty. I did find the game pretty unforgiving when some other window pops up - so make sure you turn off anything that notifies you while playing this game. At one point, I got thrown out of the game while the save file was being updated and I had to start the level over again because of corrupted data. I was not happy with that.
