Transistor on PS4: An oldie, but worth re-visiting

Released in 2014 on most systems, this game was developed by small and extremely creative studio Supergiant Games. They are not a huge developer but manage to make games that are a great deal better than many of the high-budget alternative companies. This is merely my opinion but they seem to focus on ingenuity and story-telling rather than trying to compete on graphical capabilities, which I think is very important as a smaller company.

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Set at some point in the future, Transistor puts you in control of "Red," a singer that has had her voice stolen by an enemy sporting loads of robot guards (sound strange yet?) and she is enabled to work towards retrieving it when introduced to a giant talking sword after leaving a club she was performing at. It is revealed as the story carries on that the giant sword that looks like a simcard was meant to be used to assassinate her. It is now providing her with crucial information as to the location of her would be assassins.

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The story is a bit bonkers, but stay with me here. What makes this game fantastic isn't that the story is all that compelling as it is "different." We need to have a reason for revenge in a game and the "princess has been kidnapped" is kind of a tired storyline wouldn't you agree?

The game is isometric and although that normally means simplistic, they have done wonders with the color palate and the environments are, for lack of being eloquent, rad.

The overall ambiance is enhanced by a killer original soundtrack that you can participate in by holding down L1, which as far as I have discovered is a bad idea during combat.

Now, speaking of combat:

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Combat can take place in real time or can be "paused" in order to plan out your moves which once you accept them in this overlay, will take place exactly as you had instructed and will also occur much faster than if you did them in real time. After using this option, which is called "Turn" you can not use this ability or any of your other attacks until your bar recharges.

This is normally a good time to work out your positioning for your next "turn." It's a good idea to try to line up enemies in a line if you can so that later strikes can hit more than one of them.

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As the game moves on you pick up additional abilities called "functions" that make you more lethal in combat. How you set these up is entirely up to you. This part of the game can be a bit perplexing at first but just like most things in gaming, it becomes second nature after you get used to it.

It isn't necessarily metroid-vania because in almost all instances you don't really need these skills in order to advance, it simply makes it more interesting during combat.

They won a couple of relatively prestigious awards with this release and managed to sell over a million copies of it. Even though it is 6 years old now it still manages to remain a lot of fun and there is a really good chance that even a cheap computer can easily handle the game. It is available on basically all consoles and PC and you can pick it up for near nothing. It is around $8 on Steam for example.

If you are in the market for an RPG that is cheap and a little different, Transistor is one of the better ones I have seen in the recent past.