Yes, "Transformers: War for Cybertron" is a tangibly better game than the two rushed-to-retail games that accompanied the awful "Transformers" movies released in the past three years. And, yes, by having nothing to do with the movies, "Cybertron" is free to base its story, visual presentation and game play on the cartoon, which is what "Transformers" fans have wanted all along.
But "Cybertron" improves on those games like a football team improves to 8-8 a year after it finished 1-15. It's a leap in the right direction, but one still flawed in ways fan service alone can't obscure.
First, the good stuff. The story not only takes place within the cartoon's timeline, but is a bona fide prequel instead of some trivial side story. The playable characters -- including Optimus, Megatron, Bumblebee, Starscream and Jetfire -- are colorful instead of drably indistinguishable as they were in the movies, and humans have no presence whatsoever.
As with previous "Transformers" games, players can play from the perspectives of the Autobots and the Decepticons, but in a welcome evolution, "Cybertron" merges both campaigns into a single story.
Previous games had players repeating the same events from both perspectives and effectively canceling out the two endings that resulted, but "Cybertron" reaches a single, satisfying conclusion that nicely sets the table for the cartoon.
In terms of fundamentals, the news remains good. "Cybertron" looks great -- colorful, but also just a little grimy -- and it finds the sweet spot between making the Transformers agile and impressively weighty. The controls are more conducive to transforming than they were in the movie games, and the third-person shooting and vehicular controls are pleasantly responsive. The environments are tighter than the movie games' wide-open levels, but they offer enough room for players to switch between forms as they please.
The problem comes when "Cybertron" tries to do anything ambitious with those mechanics -- because outside a few missions that incorporate air combat, it never really does. Practically every mission consists of killing X number of grunt enemies, moving to point Y and repeating ad nauseam until the boss fight, which usually consists of more mindless shooting with the occasional extra condition based on each boss character's attack pattern.
The moment-to-moment action is good enough to make "Cybertron" mindless fun anyway, but fighting the same grunt enemies and completing the same objectives gets old long before the credits roll.
