The tough thing about making a Transformers game is that you can’t just make an action game about giant robots. You’ve also got to be able to handle the vehicle side of things, and there aren’t a lot of studios out there who are equally adept at making racing games or flight sims as they are at making big robot action games.
Transformers: Galactic Trials, in development from 3DClouds, seems to be leaning more heavily on the racing side of things. The singleplayer mode has you traversing “battle-race circuits” that consist of both combat and driving challenges you have to face in the relevant forms, while collecting Prime Relics that can be spent to improve skills as well as unlocking more characters and skills. The press release says it has a “rogue-lite combat elements”, which presumably means permadeath but with persistent level-ups.
You can play as a bunch of different Autobots and Decepticons, including Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Arcee, Wheeljack, Elita-1, Megatron, Shockwave, and Soundwave. It seems like the characters who don’t traditionally transform into land vehicles will be getting alt modes that give them new truck or motorbike forms or whatever for this game, since rolling out as a guy who can turn into a stereo is probably not the best way to win a race.
There’s a plot involving Nemesis Prime, who is probably Optimus Prime’s evil clone or alternate-reality twin depending on your continuity of choice, running around stealing Prime Relics, but I can’t imagine it’ll be the focus of the game. As well as the singleplayer Galactic Trials mode, it’ll have a local multiplayer arcade mode for two players.
Transformers: Galactic Trials is due out via Steam on October 11. Meanwhile, Splash Damage is apparently still plugging away at the post-apocalyptic Transformers: Reactivate, which we first saw announced at the Game Awards in 2022, and expect to hear more about later this year.
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