Amazing art, fantastic music, pretty good story and super repetitive gameplay which has almost zero depth and appeal. I really want to like this game, because it has so many original concepts. The story design and narrative choices are really intersting: - the whole concept of letting go of the characters you care about the most feels really fresh. - how the story and the characters are reflected by the soundtrack, it feels almost like a musical at times. - the lore of the game is fun to learn about. But the "game" part is just mediocre at best. It is so very limited and the the most effective tactic, which is wiping enemy team with aura blasts and then dousing the pyre, feels almost like not playing the "correct" way. When I was done with around the half of the game I lowered the difficulty settings to easiest to be able to quicker finish the chore of the liberation rites and to get the rest of the story. I think I would prefer if Pyre would be just a visual novel, without the forced (mini)game. This is really great story to watch and to talk about but very sadly, as a game it is not much fun to play. I skimmed through the reviews of Pyre here on GOG, and it seems a lot of people call the gameplay "interesting sports game", "replayable" or even "incredibly fun". To each his own I guess... I strongly recommend to check how the gameplay actually looks on youtube before buing this, the marketing of this game is pretty misleading.
Before you bury this review for not being 5-star hear me out. First of all: presentation in this game is superb. Voice acting, music and art are equaly amazing, many AAA titles don't even come close to Transistor in terms of presentation. Combat system is also very nice, even if not balanced. My biggest problem with this game: it expects me to care without any incentive to do so. It is impossible to talk about Transistor's story without spoiling anythig because there's that little of it. You are thrown in the middle of events without any explenation - and that's cool, games often do that and explain it by amnesia. But here you don't even have the slightest idea of the world you're in, even though main character shoud. You can collect some backstory on characters by using different combination of skills but again, what's the point? The characters you will be gathering info about don't really exist in game world - you can't interact with them in any way, so why should you care? Even the ending dosen't really explain anything. Storytelling in Transistor is EXTREMELY vague. If "games are art" is something that you can imagine saying, then you should play this game. Otherwise, play Bastion instead. Transistor is not a bad game, but if you remove (amazing, non the less) presentation there is almost nothing left.
