FINALLY. I’ve been dancing around this since I picked it up 2 or 3 years ago at Gamestop for 14.99. One of PlatinumGames’ licensed games, often described as a hidden gem and one hell of a hack and slash… Transformers: Devastation! That’s right, it’s time for Autobots to Roll Out! And… that is the extent of what I know about The Tranformers. Well that’s not exactly true, when I was a kid, my older brother had a bunch of the toys and by the time I was interested in them, they were already worth a bunch of money, which I find interesting because that was the 90s, they felt contemporary! I was more of a turtles guy, anyway. I think everything I know about The Transformers I learned from the commercials. Well now I’ll gleam additional information because of this kick-ass game.

After playing The Darkness I was ready for something a little faster paced and since I was already on the Series X, I decided to pull a dusty case off the shelf. So far this game really does whip ass. It’s fast paced, has multiple characters to (quickly) choose from, multiple weapon types - both ranged and melee - WHICH you can switch up fairly quick with the d-pad and the icing on the cake… TRANSFORMING! Yes, this game would actually be quite disappointing if the titular ability was omitted, and the way they’ve decided to implement it here is very cool. Your natural state is running around like the bipedal giants the Autobots are normally seen as, but because this is a PlatinumGames experience, when you hit RB your robot not only does a dodge, but if you hold it down that dodge turns into a cool transformation and you end up in your vehicle form! It’s actually pretty cool. There are some benefits between switching up between car and foot form mid combo, and there are combos that culminate with moving from foot to car. The most powerful moves are called “vehicle attacks” and they do massive damage at the end of a perfectly completed combo. I find the prompt to perform this attack comes slightly too late, and since the input needed to do the “vehicle attack” is the same as dodge/car mode - RB - I find myself just turning into a corvette or tractor engine and just sitting there. This is a small complaint because the action is very good and this really could be a me problem.

My progress so far is into the second area, the Proudstar Ship (which is often pronounced to sound like Brown Star so Catrena and I keep laughing about that). I’ve just pushed through a series of bosses that culminated in me fighting ALL THREE of these ancient Insecticons at the same time. This was a hard fight! I think it took me 15 or 20 retries to get through it, which I’m not afraid to admit. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - I love these games but I’m not very good at them. I’m OKAY but I’m not great. I think I may try to play this on hard when I finish here because I have a feeling this game isn’t going to be that long BUT we’ll see how I feel when I finish.

SPEAKING OF FINISHING! I managed to get through the BrownProudStar and unlocked another character… A FUCKING DINOSAUR NAMED GRIMLOCK???? TRANSFORMERS HAVE DINOSAURS! It took everything in my power to shut down and head to bed instead of seeing how this dummy controls but I’m very excited to dive into Dinobot territory! Grimlock, I’ll protect you with my life.

May 24, 2026 / 9:11 pm

So … we need to talk about Grimlock. For some reason I expected the dinosaur form to be equivalent to the bipedal form of, say, Optimus Prime. But Grimlock HAS a bipedal form and the dinosaur is the vehicle form? I wasn’t quite prepared for this. Okay so if you turn from a Man to a Dinosaur in a game about men turning into cars, how do those “car” mechanics translate over? The answer is “tap B as fast as you can to wiggle the butt of the dinosaur.” Yes that’s right, you have to hammer down on the “B” button and Grimlock - in dinosaur form - will increase his speed while also jostling his huge ass to and fro.

It’s actually even weirder in practice than I am making it sound because in this game, which has been, at least up to this point, a mix of combat arenas in between driving sections full of jumps, boosts and ramps, it’s basically impossible to perform half of the tasks being asked of you as this sassy-assed dinobot. After about 30 minutes with him, and after Catrena quit yelling about his disgusting little arms, I switched back to Sideswipe who I guess is my favorite Transformer now!

Just one other observation before I wrap this game up; it really does feel like there is some unspoken class war going on between all these robots. Optimus Prime being a tractor trailer truck sort of puts this argument to bed early but here me out; all of the Autobots are in general recreational or luxury machines. Sideswipe being a sports car, Bumble-Bee a hippie’s bong wagon, Wheeljack is some kind of italian sportster. The dinosaur.. I don’t know he’s a fucking t-rex, the king of dinosaurs, that sure feels like a message to the under classes right there. And then Optimus Prime he’s not the owner-operator doing the long haul coast to coast, he’s one of those giant “toy haulers” that transforms to an air conditioned base station so his expensive sports cars can get oil changes in relative comfort. Meanwhile, you’re forced to fight economy sedans, midsized crossovers and fucking CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT! These guys just want to see their wife and kids again, they go out to the energon mines to make a living and here comes trust-fund Prime, knocking heads together all in the name of protecting Cybertron’s legacy? Come on, Optimus, get on the right side of history, don’t be a class traitor.

Devasation Prevented!

That’s a wrap on this game. I enjoyed it! It’s actually a really great hack and slash especially if you were mourning the loss of “classic bayonetta.” I know that sounds crazy but there is enough cross over with the combat that I think if you really love Bayonetta - and not just for the style, in fact those games could not be any further apart stylistically - you will find a lot to keep you occupied for a while here. I beat the final boss and destroyed the thing that could stop the thing and to be honest I had no idea what the hell these queens were talking about. All I know is the evil gray one and Optimus Prime seem to have a lot of stuff to work out behind closed doors. I was actually surprised at how emotional they both got during the final battle in space but it was a nice surprise.

What I liked

I’m trying out new ways to disseminate information in these posts because I don’t always take the best notes and I’ll actually craft these narrative ramblings in my head and hope to remember them which actually works out 70% of the time. Catrena actually bought me a microcassette recorder which I use to make quick notes to myself while playing somteimes, but I mostly use that when driving and a blog post or thoughts about a game strike me. This is going to be me trying to turn bullet points into a more connected, coherent string of thoughts.

So what did I like about Transformers: Devastation? It turns out quite a bit. There are 5 characters to choose from that all play a little different. There are plenty of weapon types, both ranged and melee, that you can level up, fuse and customize to your hearts content… as long as you have enough of them as well as money. There are skills that can be mixed and matched, status effects and elements; if you are paying attention you can really tune up the weapons to match you preferred style of playing. I mainly stuck with Sideswipe and Twin Swords that had some kind of energy thing, a few crit-ups and a focus time extension.

I liked how they didn’t forget that these huge, bulky robot guys are also cars (Grimlock notwithstanding). So the levels have jumps, boosts and obstacles that make it fun to speed around on four wheels. They’ve also integrated this into the combat with enemies that have shields that can only be broken with a rush attack (driving top speed and attacking) and in the wake of a successful combo you can get a prompt for a vehicle attack which will cause you to turn into the vehicle and then do one of a few types of very powerful moves that rely on burning rubber in some way or another. This is also the source of my biggest complaint about this game, the prompt is too sensitive and you really need to hit it QUICK. My accuracy with those attacks was abysmal and since the button prompt is RB - the same button as dodge which is also the same button used to transform from biped to vehicle - I often was left vulnerable as I turned into a car and just sat there, thinking I hit it in time! It took me to the end of the game to where I really nailed the timing on this but once you do, you can really string together attacks.

There were a few sections where they forced specific perspectives and scale changes on the player and I always love that. One was a top-down race against the clock as you needed to transport energon cubes from point a to b. It was fun but short, I felt it could have gone on longer. The other felt like a sh’mup speeding across a bridge as a vehicle while using your mounted guns to ward off other transformers and obstacles. Fun stuff!

But here’s the problem. Here’s my biggest, deepest, most egregious mistake this game made. In like the first hour of this game you end up fighting a combination of 5 bad tranformers, they’ve formed up, they’ve combine! And my god I waited this entire fucking game to also combine with my 4 homies to fight these bad guys. After the second time fighting one of these I was convinced it was coming. And then as we stormed through the headquarters of the bad robots the chartreuse construction squad forms up AGAIN. And not just that… half way through that fight they are joined by ANOTHER combination-bot. “Surely” I said, “this will be the moment for us, considering we’re ALL here, fighting together. Surely this is the perfect time to introduce the “combiner” mechanic, as I’m told this feature is called from the wiki. Alas, that fight came and went with nary a hand held or a bosom coddled from one autobot to another. There is no combiner feature! It felt like a no brainer! My god let me and 4 best robot buds hump together in an orgy of metal and glass and explosives!

Despite this misgiving, I loved this game! I played through as many challenges as it took for my eyes to glaze and over and my hands work on autopilot. Once I realized I wasn’t really trying any harder I threw in the towel. This is the kind of game I can see myself popping in when I’m bored to keep grinding out challenges but for the most part I feel like I’ve seen all I need to know this game is cool as shit. Oh by the way the music is a great combination of cheesy, 80s/90s toy-selling cartoon and double bass speed metal. It’s actually quite good.

Oh one other complaint! In the story they set up a fighter jet Decepticon to defect and it really seemed like they were going to join the Autobots and I thought “hell yeah, we’re going to fly” and that didn’t really culminate in anything. I think both the lack of flying character and the absence of the combiner would probably boil down to budget, and if there were a sequel you know sure as shit that we’d be flying all over town and combining to stomp some Decepticon ass.

PS I don’t understand why by the XBOX continues to eat my screenshots. There should be a bunch of additional shots here but they have disappeared in the ether!

This game is ...