Transformers Fall of Cybertron Full PC Game

         This is a vast improvement on War for Cybertron's treatment of its characters as essentially interchangeable, roving through metal tunnels in gangs of three and doing nothing but shoot armies of generi-bots who didn't much look like Transformers. But it's not a vast improvement on the fact that the earlier game offered little to no reason to transform outside of pre-scripted sequences. Like its predecessor, the unfortunately-abbreviated FOC is a shooter first and foremost, and transformation is a sort of bolted-on extra that the single-player game regularly appears to forget about entirely.

          Most levels will include a sudden bit of long road that would be too boring to run across, so that's a prompt to transform your robot into the indistinct, blocky, wheeled thing that represents its Cybertronian vehicle mode. Occasionally you might run out of ammo in bot mode, so transforming will mean you can use your vehicle's gun until you find a pick-up - but there's no tactical purpose to it, nor any challenges built around what transformation can entail.

           Essentially, Fall of Cybertron isn't anything more than a shooter starring robots, some of which are very familiar to children of the '80s. It has lots of dramatic set-pieces and some agreeable, if throwaway and often scripting-dependent, gimmicks. It's not Transformers as the engineered, reconfigurable objects that our parents probably hoped were teaching us some sort of spatial logic when they bought them for us; but it is Transformers as the improvised battles we lived out by bashing toys against each other in the schoolyard.

         When you get to play as Bruticus (a sadistic behemoth constructed from five Decepticons stuck to together) or Grimlock (a robotic T-rex who can breathe fire and eat other robots) it's sheer indulgence in a decades-old sci-fi playground of the imagination. While the rules, scripting and limitations are often far too obvious, I absolutely relished the childhood power fantasy. 

       Fall of Cybertron is the game Transformers fans wanted, for sure: a litany of homages and celebrations and a marked improvement on the washed-out smallness of War for Cybertron. For all that, it's not quite the game Transformers deserves, failing as it does to expand or explore the possibilities of reconfigurable characters. 

It's exactly what meets the eye - which is to say a good-hearted festival of a game about talking robots shooting and smashing each other, shouting itself raw-throated in joy at the toys it gets to play with, but no more than that.

System Requirements:

OS: Windows XP / Vista / 7/8/8.1

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz or AMD Phenom X3 8750

Memory: 2 GB system RAM

Hard Disk Space: 8.4 GB Free Space

Video Card: GeForce 8800 GT series with 512 MB RAM or ATI Radeon HD 4850 with 512 MB RAM

DirectX: DirectX 9.0c or DirectX 10

Sound: DirectX compatible Sound card.