In the ’80s, I used to love watching the Transformers cartoons every morning before school. No matter what I was doing, when Transformers came on, for those 10 minutes, I was transported.
This leads me neatly to the subject of today’s review, TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials from 3DClouds and Outright Games. To be honest, I’m surprised I haven’t played a game like this before: with the heroes literally having “Auto” in their name, why haven’t I played a Transformers racing game before?
Well, now I have, and the question I have to answer is whether the almost 40-year wait has been worth it. Autobots, roll out!
Now, the story here is complete nonsense. Nemesis Prime, the baddie, decided to steal all the Prime Relics, and while he was making his escape, his ship was shot down. Normally you’d expect to find the relics in the wreckage of the spaceship, but no, they appear to have been scattered to the four winds. “Fair enough,” a sensible robot would probably think, “I’ll just go and gather them up.” But no, for some reason, we have a series of races to decide who gets to have the Relics, and this, to me, is an awful setup. Still, we have to work with what we are given, so a race it is.
Presentation-wise, the first thing that struck me while watching the cutscenes was that I was right back in the ’80s. Optimus and Megatron look perfect, Soundwave looks like he should transform into a Walkman (remember those?), and the rest of the graphics are just nice. As the game moves into the actual races, the graphical quality remains high, with 3D models of the Transformers taking their place on the course. However, Bumblebee doesn’t transform into a Beetle, but I’ll let that slide.
The courses are well-designed and challenging, and when the time comes to fight, the models of the Transformers and the enemies are again well-realised. The sound is okay as well, with largely forgettable music, but the actual sound of the robots transforming is straight out of the ’80s, and that makes me happy. Even the voices are a reasonable facsimile of the originals, and all in all, the presentation is pretty good. Better than the story, anyway!
TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials is primarily made up of races, but with a twist: the races are split into two sections. There are the pure driving sections, which play like most other racing games, with the LT and RT buttons being the brake and accelerate buttons, respectively. Holding down the LB button while turning allows for drifting, and the X and B buttons are used to smash into opponents.
The tracks are twisty and turny and quite challenging. The opponents don’t take any prisoners either, but luckily there are various things on the track to pick up to help you, ranging from pads that give you a little boost to purple and green blocks; purple blocks refill your Energon levels, which you can use to provide yourself with a boost, sort of like a nitrous hit, and the green blocks, it will come as no surprise to anyone, refill a little bit of your health, which is depleted by collisions on the track.
Every now and then, the action switches from a racing game into a third-person shooter as you enter certain sections of the track. Here, you transform back into the robot and must run through the zone, shooting enemies in the way (and your competition if you wish). Sometimes you have to just run through the zone to the exit, transforming back into driving mode when you do so. Other times you have to destroy a certain item or number of guards to open the door to proceed.
These sections are okay, but the jumping controls are dreadful. The Transformers can only jump with the aid of a jump pad, but once airborne, they can boost to get to where you need to be. However, this is extremely haphazard and hard to aim, resulting more often than not in falling to your doom. This puts you back a bit, and it is not uncommon to lose three or more places in each section.
Each race has a couple of special conditions that you can meet to earn extra EXP, ranging from finishing in the top three to smashing into an enemy five times. The worst one, in terms of your survivability, is being restricted to firing your gun less than 30 times. As you can imagine, trying to count the amount of times you’ve fired your gun is a bit of a non-starter, and I usually end up not shooting at all when this is the active challenge. I did get an achievement the first time I did it, though and it must be said that these challenges add a little bit of spice to the action.
All in all, the racing sections of TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials work well but the shooting side of things is less well implemented. And there’s no doubt that the fusion of the two is just weird. Going from driving to running to driving again in the space of a single lap feels jarring, and I can’t help thinking that the developers should have stuck to one genre or the other.
Yet for the flaws in TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials, it’s still capable of delivering a fun and nostalgic experience for fans of the Transformers franchise.
TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials Races onto Consoles and PC with Explosive Action – https://www.thexboxhub.com/transformers-galactic-trials-races-onto-consoles-and-pc-with-explosive-action/
TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials Reveals All 11 Playable Characters! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/transformers-galactic-trials-reveals-all-11-playable-characters/
Roll out with TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials this October – https://www.thexboxhub.com/roll-out-with-transformers-galactic-trials-this-october/
Buy TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/transformers-galactic-trials/9pflw2bjvz94
