Let’s try to focus on the points where Transistor is different from Bastion, at least to start with. Transistor on the other hand does not do anywhere near enough to differentiate itself from Bastion, in my opinion, and this decision to play it safe greatly diminished Transistor’s impact because the whole time I was playing it I couldn’t get away from the feeling that I’d done this all before. Nobody had done a painterly ARPG with awesome music and a grizzled narrator back in 2011. ![]() As it is Transistor comes across as a difficult second album from a band that wasn’t expecting their first to be a hit it treads the same ground to try to bottle that lightning again, but that’s precisely what it can’t do because part of their initial success was that Bastion was different. It was probably the safe move for Supergiant to stick to what worked for them before, but since I can cut and paste my opinion from the Bastion review into this one they’ve probably stuck to it just a little bit too closely. It has a different combat system and it’s set in a different world, but otherwise it’s the same deal: the protagonist wanders through a ruined isometric landscape periodically fighting beasties while Logan Cunningham monologues at them. That Transistor can hit the same highs as Bastion while stumbling into the same pitfalls says several things about it, I think, first and foremost of which is that it’s an iteration on the basic Bastion concept rather than a whole new game in its own right. The second reason, though, was that I re-read the Bastion review after completing Transistor to see how my view of each game matched up, and I was genuinely shocked to discover that if you strip away the superficial trimmings of each title my opinion of Transistor now is exactly the goddamn same as my opinion of Bastion then: Transistor has fantastic art and music and some excellent design choices in terms of how it deals with character customisation and difficulty, but its minimalist plot and overreliance on a single narrator telling you everything is confusing and overbearing and lets the game down in its attempt to tell a meaningful story. Transistor never really had a chance of living up to those expectations, and so I’m going to keep that in mind when reviewing it I might have ended up being disappointed in Transistor, but that’s at least partially my fault and nothing to do with the actual game. One was that in the intervening two years of not playing it I’d actually forgotten all about the Bastion’s flaws and had built up a mental picture of the game that was far more generous than what I apparently thought at the time, and this led to me expecting rather more of Supergiant’s next game, Transistor, than was really fair. I thought it was good, sure, with fantastic art and music and some excellent design choices in terms of how it dealt with character customisation and difficulty, but I also thought that its minimalist plot and overreliance on a single narrator telling you everything (while showing you very little) was both confusing and more than a tad overbearing and seriously let the game down in its attempt to tell a meaningful story. ![]() How this works is a bit opaque, however really the only way you'll figure out how things work is to play and experiment.Īnd you'll need to, because successfully defeating the Process requires finesse.There's strategy required here in knowing the various attacks as well as the bets ways to defeat enemies you cannot brute force your way through this.I was a more than a little bit surprised when I went back and looked at my two year-old Bastion review to discover that, well, I didn’t think it was that great. With experience, Red acquires different abilities, here called "functions" that can modify each other and have slightly different effects depending on whether they are being used as a primary ability or are modifying another ability. And you can pause the action to plan a series of attacks which are swiftly carried out once things resume, but after which is a recharge period. Red uses the sword to fight using both melee and ranged attacks. What, exactly, is the Process, and why is it destroying Cloudbank? What are the curious creatures that it spawns to attack Red and the Transistor?Įntering combat locks down the area and you can't continue until all the enemies are destroyed, so there's no retreat. Things, as you might expect, are not what they seem. ![]() You'll also learn more about what the Transistor really is, and what it was designed for. Exactly why she was targeted is something you'll learn as you play the game. Red was the intended victim of an assassination, the Transistor the intended murder weapon.
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