Have You Played... Transformers Devastation?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

A hyper-kinetic, 80s animation-styled Transformers brawler was the entirely obvious thing to do, in hindsight. It's just that no-one thought to do it until recently. Whatever boring old men who read comics in the 80s (hello) might think, the popular concept of Transformers is nothing more than big huge robots twatting each other in the face, so Devastation taking that to the extreme was only sensible.

I don't know that last year's Devastation is either a great Transformers game or a great game, but it's not a bad Transformers game and nor is it a bad game. Which crucially, bucks the general trend for Transformers games. It's fast, it's pretty, it asks for dexterity but not a sickening amount of it, and it's been honed to feel highly responsive in the hand. It suffered from repetition and unconvincing environments, but given the sheer number of ways it could have gone horribly wrong, Platinum did a damned good with it.

It's just... well, to me, Transformers fights were always A-Team fights. Everyone shooting, everyone basically a bit crap at it, no-one really getting hurt. The robots were big and lumbering and always falling down and, frankly, clumsy. It's hard to buy them as these pirouetting, light-speed martial artists.

I don't know how you make that into a game, but I want to play it. Transformers: Cack-handed Robots In Disguise.