Transistor

After playing Bastion, I had high hopes for this game, but apart from its gorgeous visual style and great voice acting, Transistor falls short of my expectations. Also while I really, really liked the mixture of Art Deco an Tron, the enemies don't really fit in. Well, the music is nice but even there I liked Bastion's better. Now while Bastion was some sort of mini action RPG with stylized graphics, the only game mechanism in Transistor is a mixture of real time and turn based combat in arenas. The only other thing you can do is accessing terminals now and then to get story pieces and restore disabled "functions". The game has very little contents and is stretched by challenge rooms. This also serves to train using different "function" which are combat skills that can be either used as "active" or "upgrade" ability. If you die in a fight, you're punished by disabling one of your functions (until you accessed two terminals). This was obviously meant to force the player to also use function combinations that he/she wouldn't use otherwise. To be honest, this didn't work for me at all and found it totally frustrating to be forced into using a suboptimal function combination in fights that I already lost with the best possible combination. This adds to the already very unbalanced difficulty. E.g. one of the hardest boss fights in the game is very early in the game. On top of the already sufficiently confusing skill system the game also implements "limiters" which are handicaps that e.g. make the enemies stronger but give you more experience points. I must admit that I enabled some in the middle of the game without really understanding their purpose. Honestly I still don't understand why I should use them. The story is somewhat muddled. It's quite obvious that everything takes place in a computer and the characters are programs, but in the end all of this doesn't make any sense. So the storytelling isn't minimalist - there just isn't any sensible story to be told.

I've tried this game because I really loved Bastion, but my expectations did not meet. The game displays an amazing combat system... just to waste it on a very short story (no, new game+ dows not count). The voice acting is amazing, the visuals are ok (the characters and eneies are well made, but the world is empty at best). The penalties for dying are fair and quite clever, and you can create dozens of different moves to adjust your style. The weakest point of the game is that the map design is terrible (you basically can't know if you activate the passage to the next zone or choose a sidetrack, and there is no turning back). Stone me to death, but the biggest problem is that the game is boring. Yeah, there is a touching story behind it, but the dramaturgy and tempo between fights and story pretty much kills it. I've alt+tabbed it more times than any other game.

Like the title says. It's a lovely short game. The music is amazing and the story is good

I have to say this was was a fun game. I love singplayer experiences where the art style, gameplay and plot work together and Transistor delivered. Never thought I'd enjoy an isometric RPG where there's both turn-based and realtiem combat, and the use of music was well-done and powerful. Bravo Supergiant!

It's the first game of its kind that I play and I must say I was surprised by how entertaining I found the combat to be. It's not as passive as a purely turn based as it has real time action and allows choosing when to apply each, so that was good. I enjoy the atmosphere, pretty cool art direction and music. The story is still kind of cryptic at the momemt but that kind of keeps me wanting to decypher what's going on