I found myself seeing the Turn system mostly when the game called an emergency mode which happens when the player health reaches zero. Again, an interesting idea, but one which is followed by a brief cooldown period in combat, asking players to make an either/or choice to whether realtime action was preferable. Movement included, orders will accommodate sections of the timeline (think Frozen Synapse), and are executed when committed to the player. The other half of combat is focuses on the “Turn” system, a power which freezes gameplay for tactical planning. In this way, the game almost seems to suggest that a lack of commitment to its systems is an ideal way of approaching gameplay. By the time a powerful enemy shows up, useful combinations are sooner a liability than strong asset. This is an interesting system at first, slowly crippling characters before an outright death, but ultimately defies any carefully crafted abilities that may be keepers. Unfortunately, players lose powers in battle, which must be recollected at equipment checkpoints. Since anything can be stacked on top of another power, there’s the potential to create wasteful or ineffective combinations, which gives the sense of experimentation that can reward or penalize. These enemy/attack match-ups are appointed in a way that make sense to the developer, but quickly wash away when returning to the main game, due to the wide variety of enemy types that appear throughout whereas the player may only assess their equipment at specific checkpoints. Players will occasionally encounter an offsite island where challenge rooms will test their skill with a specific set of abilities matched against a specific type of enemy, a la Bastion’s weapon-specific challenges. Transistor finds difficulty in justifying its the abilities system at play, as the aforementioned depth generally obscures the benefit of using one power over any other in a given instance. Mapped to the face buttons, combat centers around these combined abilities in locked off arenas, in which all enemies must be dispatched in order to progress. Transistor’s gameplay is both deeper and less transparent than Bastion’s, featuring abilities that can be stacked upon each other in order of an attack power, upgrade components, or equipped to the character for passive use. Set in a futuristic city, players take the mold of Red, a female protagonist with a chatty sword sidekick, as they venture on to figure out what happened the night before. What it maintains, however, is a striking combination of aesthetics and audio. While set in a familiar isometric perspective, Transistor abandons Bastion’s disembodied narrator and gains a more tactical combat system. Supergiant Games’ sophomore effort has finally arrived in the form of Transistor, a PC and PS4 exclusive follow-up to 2011’s Bastion.
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