Transistor ps4 review: Transistor for PlayStation 4 Reviews

Transistor: The Kotaku Review

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Yannick LeJacq

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«Jesus, how much longer is this?» I texted my friend, putting down the PlayStation 4 controller to pause Transistor.

«I think I’m just bad at video games,» I added.

«About 5 hours maybe,» he wrote back, laughing in the way that one makes clear through a text message. He had finished the whole thing in that amount of time.

I wasn’t writing him because I was unhappy playing Transistor, the long-awaited second act from Bastion creator Supergiant Games. If anything, I was texting him because I was enjoying it too much.

I usually play video games slowly. But even by my molasses-like standards, I could tell I was advancing through Transistor at a sluggish pace—seeking out every possible nook and cranny of its gorgeously opaque world to find more hints about what had happened to Red, the silent and mysterious protagonist. More often than that, I was reveling in the infectious joy of poking and prodding around the game’s combat system. Every time I discovered a new ability, I would dart back to the game’s training grounds as soon as I could to put it through the ringer.

This had landed me in a deadline-driven panic. I came home after work one night last week to defeat what I thought was a final boss, only to realize I wasn’t even halfway through.

«Maybe I should stop playing with so many limiters,» I wrote to him, referring to a set of modules you unlock that increase the difficulty of the combat in various ways and its ensuing rewards.

«Dude why are you using those!!» he responded. «No wonder!»

Part of me wanted to take all the process limiters away, to make the rest of Transistor a walk in the park so I could spend the weekend enjoying the all-too rare glimpse of the sun we had in New York City. But I couldn’t bring myself to. As I acquired more limiters, I would lay them on top of the ones I already had. This wasn’t to punish or prove anything to myself. I kept making the game harder, I eventually realized, because I didn’t want it to end.

It’s nice when a game is beautiful, which Transistor is. It’s even better when its story is moving and gracefully presented as well, which Transistor’s is. But I always know it’s a sign of something special when a game is so much fun that just playing through its practice rounds and time trials feels like a treat. Those are the levels I started playing the moment I’d finished Pikmin 3, the stages I worked towards eagerly when I wasn’t ready to be done with Super Mario 3D World, the ones I’m still playing in Gears of War 3 for some compulsive reason.

Transistor is a smaller, more tightly framed experience than any of those games. But its diminutive stature just makes it feel like more of a triumph considering the league in which I’d place it. Pikmin is a great point of comparison, actually, because like that Nintendo classic, Transistor creates a riff on an established genre that feels so novel it risks becoming eccentric, even off-putting for new players.

For Pikmin, that’s real-time strategy. Transistor takes on a far more peculiar beast: the action role-playing game. I don’t really know what that mouthful means at this point, but the way Supergiant handles the hybrid genre is far more interesting, and far more rewarding, than Bastion ever was.

I want to focus on the combat here because, again, I’m scared that curious gamers might be dissuaded by obtuse jargon or vague promises if I just say that Transistor combines elements of real-time action RPG gameplay with tactical turn-based maneuvers. It does do that, and it does so expertly. But it’s also a rare example of a game that picks and chooses motifs from other titles to make something that feels wholly new.

The majority of Transistor’s gameplay is split into two parts. There’s the real-time portion where you’re running around a dystopic science fiction city known as Cloudbank. It’s a desolate place that reminds of what I loved about the original BioShock—a haunting, roomy space that hums with mystery of the regrets of people who once lived there, and the unhealthy obsessions of those who still do. I don’t want to delve into the story because Transistor spins a thread that’s difficult to pull on without disassembling the whole thing. So I’ll just say that before everything went down in Cloudbank, Red was a famous singer. The game begins with her, now without a voice, pulling a giant talking sword (the eponymous transistor, voiced by Bastion narrator Logan Cunningham) out of a man’s chest and trying to figure out what exactly went wrong.

Before long, Red is beset on all sides by killer robots. This is where the second part of Transistor’s gameplay comes in, the so-called «planning mode.» With the tap of a button (R2 for the PS4), you enter into a stasis that feels like it was pulled straight out of XCOM: Enemy Unknown down to the level of the thin, militaristic reticles that plot out your moves. You have a finite amount of energy that can be used to walk around the map, attack bad guys, or use other abilities.

As with many turn-based games, you can revise your plan up until the point that you execute it. Once you do, there’s no turning back. With another press of the button, time revs up and Red whips around the map at a blinding speed. Her enemies do their best to react.

Here’s a video showing how I slowly (but surely!) wrapped my head around using the planning mode to its full effect in one of the game’s challenge levels. You can almost hear the gears turning in my head as I get closer and closer to connecting the dots:

Your enemies aren’t this patient in the main game, however. They meet your advances with a calculated efficiency, which is where things start to get really interesting. Because unlike a game like XCOM or any number of turn-based RPGs that I’ve played recently, the bad guys in Transistor aren’t content to just sit around and let you pummel them for a full «turn.» Once you give Red the green light, they begin whipping around the map as well.

At first this is just irritating, like swatting away small flies. But pretty soon, even the smallest hiccup in your plan leads to serious problems. There’s a cool-down period between Red’s turns, during which she’s much slower and weaker than most opponents. Some abilities can be used before you fully recharge, but for the most part you spend this time running to cover and trying to avoid hostile projectiles as best you can.

All of this creates a diverse set of challenges. I found the wraith-like enemy class known as «Young Lady» to be particularly tricky, for instance, because she has this infuriating ability to teleport instantaneously when you land your first blow. With most enemies, you can chart a rough trajectory and aim your attacks accordingly. But the Young Lady still manages to take my by surprise well into the new game plus mode.

Take this moment I started to capture because I was trying to get a good clip of guiding Red gracefully to victory. There were only a few bad guys left, I thought. This won’t be that hard.

Well, here’s how it turned out:

The end of that clip shows one of my favorite parts of Transistor’s combat. Rather than just letting you die outright, the game devises a far more clever punishment: each time your health is completely drained, you lose one of your abilities. You can’t get it back until you’ve survived another fight or two either.

What I love about this isn’t that the combat is invigorating, or even that its distinctive combination of real-time and, er, not real-time motions captures both the nail-biting tension of XCOM and the hedonistic joy of running around and breaking things in a game like Diablo III. It’s the way that Transistor is constantly pushing you to think on your feet, to master any new plan of attack no matter how limited your repertoire, or how crazily desperate your actions might be.

The enemies evolve in turn. Roving drone-like bots with cameras mounted on their heads start out by splattering a large picture of Red on the screen to distract you, but by the end of the game they’re creating a fog of war that blocks your entire field of vision of planning mode. Others spawn fungal-like material on the ground or lay down force fields that pull you out of planning mode entirely. The process limiters that you’re handed as you level up exaggerate these subtle shifts by, say, making enemies more powerful, limiting the available space you have to equip abilities, or extending cool-down period.

The reason I liked playing Transistor with all of these enabled is because the increased challenge encouraged me to use every one of Red’s powers to the best of her abilities—and mine. By the time I put down my DualShock 4 to write this review, I’d unlocked 16 powers. These range from a number of different ranged, melee, and area-damaging attacks to others that let you warp a few feet in any direction (Jaunt) or convert your enemies temporarily (Switch). You can only use four of these as attack moves at any given time, which can be assigned to slots that match to each of the controller’s symbol-faced buttons. The remainder can be slotted in below your attack moves as upgrades or assigned to Red as passive abilities.

Transistor doesn’t do much to teach how all of this works. But that makes the process of discovering it yourself all the better. It’s a cyberpunk fiction about hacking into an overarching malicious IT superstructure, after all. Learning how to manipulate the system to work in your favor is part of the fun. Fairly early on, I learned that upgrading Jaunt with Switch made the time between my plans a recklessly delightful gamble of lunging towards a group of enemies only to see them turn on themselves a moment later. Upgrading a ricocheting projectile (Bounce) with a damage amplifier (Void) and scattershot attack (Spark) turned it into an enormously powerful explosive like the banana bombs from Worms Armageddon.

And that’s not even getting into using different abilities in sequence. I didn’t appreciate how powerful a slow-moving ball of energy (Flood) was until I figured out I could use another lassoing ability (Get) to pull enemies into its path—something I only realized when I was so low on available powers I picked those two out of sheer necessity.

The endless combining and experimenting only gets deeper from there. As your plans become more complex and attenuated, actually managing to pull them off feels better and better in turn. The first time I used Load to deposit a bomb in the center of a group of bad guys, Jaunt-ed away to escape its blast radius, and then shot the thing to detonate it felt like I’d just lived through the entire plot of some epic spy movie in the span of a few seconds.

This all may sound dry and mechanical. And Transistor is one of those games that asks you to meet its challenges as if you’re staring down a giant spreadsheet. But your mastery over the transistor’s abilities mirrors Red’s growing attachment with the voice embedded within it in a profound way. You slowly start to learn about the history between these two, the love they once shared and wish they could again.

In the moments when Red first plunges into her planning stasis, everything gets eerily quiet for a fleeting moment. Then her voices rises up with a deep, rich timbre. She’s not singing, only humming, but it’s beautiful all the same. This is where she can still come to life, I thought the first time this happened. This is where she still holds some power.

Was there any doubt, then, that once I’d finished Transistor I would do anything other than start it all over again? I want to go back to the practice room and test out my new stealth power, I told myself.

I’d fallen in love with the sword too.

To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.

Transistor review | Eurogamer.net

Transistor’s confusing, artful and ultimately dazzling — and it’s wrapped around a combat system that rewards experimentation.

Transistor isn’t the first game to put its soul into its sword, but it is the first to be quite so transparent about it. Hundreds of action RPGs have already made it clear that the heft and feel of a blade is the focal point for so many loving tweaks and balances, yet Transistor also allows its eponymous weapon to narrate the storyline and play a crucial role in how it unfolds. In the city of Cloudbank, silenced songstress Red stands over the body of a man whose life has been transferred into the perspex skewer that now sticks out of his chest. Draw the sword and start the adventure. Hundreds of games do this stuff too, but none do it in quite this way.

Traditional ideas delivered from an unusual perspective? That was the ethos of Supergiant’s debut, Bastion, and it’s changed very little here. Bastion buried an old-fashioned hack-and-slash under hand-painted visuals and a lattice of narration delivered in whiskyish, conspiratorial tones. It offered, in the process, a carefully controlled action game that somehow felt like it was running to catch up with you. Compared to such rough-housing, Transistor is a self-conscious study in elegance, yet it still works within an established genre while laying on supplementary ideas. We’re deep in action RPG territory, with all the skill bars and cooldowns you might expect, but the story’s daringly elliptical in its telling, and the combat dances between real-time and a clever spin on turn-based battling, always flirting, never settling, and drawing its restless energy from an underlying system that encourages tinkering.

At times, Transistor’s story may be a little too elliptical. You can race through the campaign and well into New Game Plus before much beyond the basics of the plot have taken shape in your mind. Supergiant enters late and treats you like a grown-up who’s really paying attention. Even then, it merely nudges you towards the main themes and a proper understanding of the backstory, laying out a narrative inquest — or at least an intriguing and portentous muddle — in which, with a few exceptions, you can draw your own conclusions.

If Tron had been directed by Klimt or Mucha, it might feel like this. Beneath the looping drums and fuzzy guitars of Darren Korb’s wonderfully distanced soundtrack, Transistor’s city is Art Nouveau circuitry inlaid with gold leaf and reflective marble and filled with short journeys and bustling connections. Nursing her stolen voice and that talking sword, Red’s battling to save this delicate metropolis from a shadowy organisation and a kind of cybernetic parasite called the Process, now busy racing around deleting entire neighbourhoods. A lot of what follows still refuses to untangle itself: as far as I can tell, Transistor seems pretty agitated by the distractions, homogenisation, and faux democracy of social media and perhaps by the strange power of celebrity. It’s so varied and complex in its fixations that the whole thing can only be the material from someone’s favourite dinner party spiel.

The world’s linear, but it’s riddled with playful details.

No matter. It’s rare to be cast as someone who’s famous enough to be papped in the middle of combat, while Cloudbank itself is the kind of place where citizens would rather vote on the colour of the sky than explore the deadlier mysteries that hover around them. For all its artifice, I suspect Transistor ultimately has a human focus. It offers glimpses of the ghosts that end up trapped within our technologies — of the soul pinned between relays and amplifiers.

Technology never looked quite like this, mind. Transistor’s world is a glorious, and gloriously confident creation. Brass and stained glass curlicues draw your eyes across isometric battlefields filled with dreamland skyscrapers; at times, the glittering urban sprawl seems to be viewed through a lens smeared with fingerprints. Cloudbank feels like a town inside an old perfume bottle, and Red’s an arresting lead. She’s both wilful and vulnerable as she drags her massive sword into battle, the tip sending up sparks as it races over the ground. Her enemies range from the Jony Ive turrets and greyhounds of the Process to the Schiele-like aristocrats, all bruised cheekbones and arthritic knuckles, who make up the crew pulling the strings.

And if the narrative falters beneath the weight of hints and feints and the sheer degree of unusual terminology, the narration never does. The tricks that kept Bastion moving are employed with even greater subtlety here; they no longer feel like tricks at all. Although the main events emerge slowly, the minute-to-minute action is enhanced by the soul trapped in that sword — Bastion’s voice actor Logan Cunningham again — urging you through the adventure, postulating on what’s next, and at times registering surprise at your behaviour. He points out elements of the environment you might have missed, and he comments drily on bad decisions made on the battlefield. «That’s one way to do it,» he’ll deadpan after a particularly graceless exchange of blows. It’s subtly instructive to have him around, yet he never succumbs to the fate of so many other video game companions. He never becomes the animated paperclip from MS Word.

Signal and noise

Although similarities with Bastion are easy to spot, the folksy days of the kid are behind you here: Transistor sees a far more troubled narrative unfolding, and a certain distance seems to be part of the package.

This is true even for the relationship between the player and the avatar. Asked to type in a comment at the bottom of an online news story, Red first enters just one word, «Help», before deleting it. It’s a moment that delivers a genuine thrill: if you’re her, right, why didn’t you know she was going to do that?

Lovely stuff, but it’s secondary to the game’s main appeal. Although you proceed through isometric maps, dipping from one pool of darkness to the next as you work across the city, taking polls, leaving comments beneath online news stories and learning more about the devilish dandies you’re up against, the heart of Transistor lies not with exploration but with combat and the systems drawn into its orbit. It’s a bold move to make a pretty, even lavish game that’s mechanically so sparse. Luckily, what mechanics there are tend to be ingenious.

Functions are initially pretty confusing, but there’s a lot of fun to be had making sense of them.

Combat initially seems straightforward as the map sporadically bars your exits to create a snug little arena and then fills the space with luminous white cover that pops from the ground like the bars of a graphic equaliser. You have four active skills you can use against your enemies at any one time — you can swap them out between fights at access points scattered around the maps — and once most of the Process are dispatched under your thudding, candescent blows, you have just seconds to collect the Cells that drop from them before they respawn. Even at this stage there are a lot of traditional concerns to think about. Heavy attacks are slow, fast attacks are light, and the emphasis is on placement as much as rhythm: make use of cover and backstab enemies for greater damage.

Three main tricks elevate things. The first is the idea of turns, which allow you to pause the battle and plan a series of actions which will then be played out in the blink of an eye. It sounds over-powered, but you’ll need to be clever, as mere movement eats away at the time you have to play with in a turn, and the relative lengths of specific attacks carry over from standard battling too.

Ideally, you’ll want to dash in, strike, and then dash away again so you can hide as your turn recharges and you’re left unable to defend yourself. That isn’t always possible, though, particularly when the enemies tend to arrive in clever congregations. Ranging from Weeds, plastic tendrils with an area attack and heal, and Cheerleaders, little satellite dishes which can lay down shields, all the way through to the lumbering Jerks and the teleporting Youngladies, Transistor’s menagerie of foes are designed to work together, buffing, repairing, and even flanking. As with Bastion, it’s not particularly hard to win a fight, but it’s hard to win with flair.

Transistor’s second trick lies with the framework around the combat system, an RPG build creator which makes just picking your load-out of skills — or to use Transistor’s terminology, functions — as much fun as using them. Functions can either be placed into active slots, in which case they’ll work as one of your four main attacks, or into upgrade sub-slots to augment specific active functions. In the language of Diablo 3, each skill is also a potential rune for all other skills. Additionally, you can even choose to place functions in passive slots, where they will confer traits like boosted health.

Some of the juxtapositions are a little too neat — a body without a voice paired with a voice without a body.

Supergiant’s built a tight system in which almost nothing is wasted and experimentation is encouraged. Purge, for example, spawns a parasite as an active function, but as an upgrade, it applies corruption effects to other functions or gives you a passive counter-blow when struck. Elsewhere, Ping is feeble but fast as a straight-up ranged shot, but when used in an upgrade slot can reduce the time of an attack in a turn or can passively afford you faster movement. There are enough of these functions drip-fed throughout the game with each new level hit to ensure that you can play for hours in Transistor’s wonderful laboratory of violence, juggling builds that win enemies over to your side, make you invisible, or summon decoys. Every trip to an access point becomes a chance to try something unlikely, discover that it works, and then promote it to a full-blown tactic until the next unlikely discovery comes along.

Such a mix-and-match approach requires deft balancing from the designers, and you can tell because that balance isn’t always quite right. Jaunt, used as an upgrade, for example, allows you to spam an attack when waiting for a turn to recharge. It’s such a powerful advantage that it can often reduce the elegant combat to button-mashing — and the game never truly provides a reason for you to stop using it.

This is where Transistor’s final trick comes in, however. Defeat in combat won’t initially lead to your death. Instead, it will remove the function you’ve been relying on the most and keep it out of rotation for a while. It’s a simple but startling penalty, forcing you away from a favoured load-out and back to experimentation. Like the best restrictions, it ultimately frees players. It frees them from themselves and the ruts that the min-maxing approach can cause. Elsewhere, alongside new functions and ways to use them, each level reached also includes Limiters, which offer XP boosts from combat in exchange for harsher battle conditions. It’s another Bastion idea, but it really clicks here, mounted in a rare game that genuinely expands in creative scope as it gets harder.

Towards the end of the campaign you’ll meet enemies who can disrupt your turns.

Together, the whole thing clicks, in fact, especially when the cooldown that follows a turn moves the game away from a real-time flow and dials up the attendant panic. I love games that will make you meaningfully bear the cost of a mistake, and I love games that let you tinker until you’ve created a build that’s really weird, but that still works in a world designed to encourage weird thinking.

If there’s a problem, in fact, it’s that functions are still only starting to present their stranger pleasures by the time the game comes to an end somewhere around the five-hour mark. I’m not arguing that Transistor should be longer, as I’d rather have a short game with this much poise and density of detail than a long game that runs out of ideas. The issue, though, is that Transistor hasn’t quite run out of ideas.

Price and availability

  • Available on PC and PlayStation 4 on 20th May: £14.99

When you head back for another playthrough, however, you’ll find a game that’s eager to greet you, New Game Plus not only carries over character progression, but also juggles encounters around to keep them interesting, while a range of additional combat challenges will allow you to continue tinkering within some energising restrictions.

That those challenges are housed in a weird trans-dimensional coastal getaway where you can kick a physics-enabled beach ball about or lie in a hammock is just one of many unusual things to enjoy about Transistor. Enjoy the artful approach to science-fiction, enjoy the hoops Supergiant’s jumped through to position you in the right place to engage with its combat, and you can even enjoy the very fact that the game often struggles to get its deeper messages across. After all, if the developer had something straightforward to say, it might not have had to make a game in the first place.

9
/ 10

Transistor PS4 Review | Stratege

“When everything changes, nothing changes
nothing…»

Relatively young independent development studio SuperGiant
Games broke into the gaming industry in 2011 with the release of a very
colorful, exciting game Bastion for Xbox 360 and PC,
which captivated many players with its unique charm,
interesting role-playing gameplay and, of course, design.
Today, the developers of this studio bring to the public their new
the project is no less than Bastion, a kind of project for the PlayStation
4 and PC named Transistor . Welcome to
the cyber-city of Cloudbank, in which power is in the hands of an elite
four «Camerata», and the population can express their will when
the help of terminals, where many issues are resolved by voting —
up to the weather! 53% of the population wants to see today
snow, and 47% dream of a warm sun? I’m sorry, 47%, cook
sheepskin coats and felt boots…

From the first minutes of playing Transistor, an unusual, but
its style is very familiar to Bastion game design, as well as
unhurried, measured presentation of the plot in a voice … all the same
off-screen narrator, but this time imprisoned in the sword of the main
heroines — «Transistor». The history of the game begins with
the main character named Red, who until recently was the most melodic and
beloved voice of the city, attacked but survives.
She discovers herself not far from a dead man, from which
sticks out a hefty sword. Suddenly, from a cold weapon is heard
a voice addressing her by name, urging the girl to draw her sword, and
together with him to find those responsible for the incident. This is how our
exciting, but, alas, a very short adventure, on
during which we learn more about the city and fight with
robotic opponents — a kind of «viruses»,
out of control of the Camerata and hitting the cyber city,
causing it to disappear little by little.

The gameplay here is both similar and unlike Bastion at the same time.
That is, we have, at first glance, an isometric action, in
in which the main character can fight with a sword in real time,
but literally in the second battle, the game invites us to delve into the game
mechanics and

demonstrates the tactical pause mode. By pressing the «R2» button, we
we find ourselves in the planning mode, where we indicate at what point
move our heroine and what techniques to use against
existing opponents. By pressing the button again, we exit the game from
planning mode and Red takes all the actions we specified
in exact sequence. There are two points to note: first,
depending on the type of strikes inflicted, opponents can
move, so when using AOE techniques (hitting
radius) do not forget that, for example, two out of three hits can
«throw» the enemy out of the attack radius, and the third hit will go «in
milk». Secondly, planning is limited by a special scale,
displayed at the top of the screen, but if it remains at least
half a centimeter of unoccupied space, you can fit even the most
«long» function. Everyone else will just cringe a little.

Transistor tricks are called functions and are obtained gradually with
progress of the game and increasing the level of the heroine. In fact, all of these
functions, are the virtual souls of the inhabitants of Cloudbank,
which are absorbed by the «Transistor». Like the soul of a man obviously
very close acquaintance and in love with Red, who spoke to
her at the start of the game. About who owns this or that function,
can be viewed by connecting to a special «Access Point»,
by pointing the cursor at the function of interest and pressing the triangle. You
you will even find the Red function that got into the «Transistor», most likely,
along with the voice stolen from her — a piece of the soul of every singer
or a singer. Each function in this game can perform one of three
roles: to be an active reception, to be an amplifier of some other
functions, or to strengthen the heroine herself. For example, the «Crash» function
can be combat and weaken the enemy, causing little damage,
be ancillary, adding another function, the effect of attenuation
enemy, or, when placed in a passive skill slot, increase
security ed. Or, the «Joint» technique, when set to
action space, can move our heroine a small
distance, enhancing the function — to allow its use during
restore the turn bar, or speed up the restoration of this
scale by 25% if placed in a passive.

It is noteworthy that after obtaining all the available functions in the game,
with further rise in levels, we will be able to study copies already
acquired abilities, which will radically change

their combat tactics. The number of equipped functions is limited
the amount of available memory of the «Transistor», and each of the tricks
greedy in its own way. So often you have to face
choosing which feature to prioritize. In addition to the functions
strengthening our heroine, there are optional constraints that
one way or another, weaken it. Directly or indirectly. Unlike
functions, limiters are the «souls of processes», and therefore
act on the side of the enemy. So, for example, there is a limiter,
which temporarily «burns» the function if the player removes it from any
cells, but there is a limiter that increases the strength of all processes in
twice. In addition to making the game more difficult, limiters provide
additional experience — if you equip all ten pieces, then to the number
the experience gained will add about a third of it.

Variety of process and boss battles in Transistor, in
mainly depends on the equipment of the heroine, because there is no
enemies with cunning tactics or, say, with their own weaknesses.
Processes are equally vulnerable to attacks, and are also equally vulnerable to attacks.
after their death, they try to leave a living cell. If such
you don’t have time to pick up the cell, then it will either turn into hostile
defective cell, or degenerate into an adversary similar to the one
who «postponed» it. From which we can draw a modest conclusion —
processes multiply by cell division. There are tricky limits
which increase the amount left by some enemies
cells, and also provide these cells with protection in the form of force
fields. But if you read well the possibilities of functions, you can find
one move that, when placed in the boost slot of another
functions, when killing an enemy has a considerable chance of preventing
appearance of cells. That is, some negative effects in this
the game can be somewhat reduced with proper, so to speak,
management. Which, of course, adds the same diversity and
excitement in battle.