Transistor PS4 Review: Red Is The Color Of Love

Review

May 25th, 2014 By Mont Brown

Red Is The Color Of Love

Supergiant Games first  Playstation 4 debut is a very charming title with lots of character. The game is a delightful cocktail mix of great story telling combined with slick visuals, smooth gameplay and an incredible soundtrack worth adding to your music collection. Based in cybernetic Utopia. Transistor takes place in the city of Cloudbank,  a futuristic world where every decision made must first be surveyed and polled by its citizens, from the weather system to the very color of the sky.

You take on the role of Red a popular singer tasked with the challenge of stopping a revolutionary group by the name of Camerata determined to bring an end to Cloudbank's civility, turning it into a dystopian society. Stealing the organizations secret weapon, a mysterious blade of unknown origins known as the Transistor, Red must end Camerata's plans to take over Cloudbank city.

In retaliation the terrorist group steal Red's voice, killing her accomplice in the process, sealing him within the mysterious weapon for all eternity. Left with no other options, Red must stand against this deadly group doing all she must to destroy Camerata and save her friend in the process.

In the midst of all this, Cloudbank's systems begins to fail from the over-mounting pressure of their popular ideologies, but among the chaos and destruction is a heartfelt love story that will pull you in, leaving you contemplating all you have experienced through your journey in Transistor long after the game is finished.

Red Is The Color Of Life

The story is beautiful delivered through clever narratives, sprawled across various civilian accessed computers, audio logs and unique communication styles. From its initial appearance you may mistake Transistor as just another isolated action game. You are faced with hordes of enemies, which you must destroy using a set of powers. Each of these skills can either be used in active, upgrade or passive time periods. Active skills enable you to perform attacks during fights, upgrades enhance your active skills and passives give you permanent stat bonus increases.

You are only allowed to access four active powers at one time, forcing you to choose your weapon load-out for each scenario. Supergiant Games have also included a neat feature for those seeking a little more challenge, allowing hardcore gamers to increase the difficulty in return for XP and extra bonus perks.

Another very interesting and important feature to Transistors gameplay mechanics is the Blade's time stopping ability. Among an array of other things your weapon can do, the Transistor can also allow you to pause an ongoing action in order to plan-out a series of commands. Once completed these orders will then be played out in quick successions, laying waste to hordes of enemies, thus allowing enough time to cool-down and hopefully survive the enemy onslaught.

This distinctive feature makes the battle system feel very satisfying adding a nice flow to the games rhythm. This also means that each battle is played out more like a puzzle game than an action RPG. Utilizing quick reflexes are very important but not as much as taking your time to plan and strategies your attacks carefully if you are to be victorious. Regardless of this unique style of gameplay, Transistor doesn't feel too complicated or slow. Each concept is very straight forward to understand, but the depth of gameplay is achieved by its methods of innovative interactions.

Red Is The Color Of Passion

Visually Transistor's level of detail is very evident from its beautifully designed penthouse apartments, to its futuristic streets full of vibrant colors. All this is brought to life through an incredibly score full of heart tugging electro ballads that strikes a perfect balance with the onscreen action. You can even have Red humming along to the music from a press of a button further adding to tracks haunting melodious appeal.

Overall

Supergiant Games have done a brilliant job introducing a title on the PS4 that is both delightful from a visual and sensory point of view. Transistor is a clever innovative story of love, social turmoil's and politics all conveyed through an incredible rock solid strategy puzzler. The visuals and music is very well presented and we are more than certain you will be left pondering about Red and your experience of Cloudbank city long after the game is over.  This is one title we highly recommend adding to your must have lists of PlayStation 4 games.

The amazing Electro ballad soundtrack from Transistor is now available to buy on Amazon, by clicking the image below.

Red Is The Color Of Music

 


Score

5/5