Transformers Shadows Rising Rolls Out To Arcades In The West

arcadehero July 20, 2018 3
Transformers Shadows Rising Rolls Out To Arcades In The West

If you enjoyed Sega’s first foray into the Transformers franchise after they released Transformers: Human Alliance back in 2011, then you are in luck as they have launched a sequel. We’ve been covering the progression of Transformers Shadows Rising since it first appeared at Amusement Expo 2018. Today, Sega sent out this tweet that afterwards I confirmed means that the game is shipping out to locations now.

While the game plays in a similar manner to Human Alliance, there have been some improvements to it that I think made for a better game overall. The achievements system is welcome and the Hypertech Energy Lever brings more depth to this casual game style. It would be interesting to see how this could be adapted to the R360 style Special Edition of Transformers Human Alliance found at the Tokyo Joypolis.

To see it in action (in the event that you missed it), here are videos of the game; first from Amusement Expo 2018, then more recently from Bowl Expo 2018:

The near-final software (spoilers inside as this is the final level of the game):

If you have had a chance to play this already, what did you think of it?

3 Comments »

  1. Da Flex July 21, 2018 at 8:47 am - Reply

    The animations look cheap. By only rating the videos, I don’t like it.

  2. datdude July 22, 2018 at 2:48 pm - Reply

    @Da Flex: It’s an arcade release, what do you expect? But more than that, what is it w/ people these days doing armchair analysis of games w/o even bothering to play them?

    It’s lame; people don’t go talking about movies in an objective “is it good/bad?” way until they’ve, well, actually watched that movie. That standard shouldn’t suddenly lax w/ video games and needing to at least play them a bit before saying they’re good or bad.

    That said, if you’ve already played previous versions of that game and/or are really good at analyzing game design etc., I think there’s legroom there to be able to give valid opinions (not necessarily absolutes of if something is definitely good/bad tho unless, again, you’ve played it at least a decent amount).

  3. Da Flex July 23, 2018 at 12:50 pm - Reply

    @datdude:
    We usually don’t have a chance to play new arcade stuff in Germany. So, I do my judgement based on videos, and having the perspective of a game developer, too.

    If you take “Let’s Go Island”, animations are poor, too. But that title is still appealing, because everybody got a connection to that holiday style.

    Transformers SR is about fantasy mechanical robots. To make this appealing, SEGA should invest more into animations to make it interesting for people, who are not Transformer fans. If SEGA don’t create a connection to reality, they must create good fantasy animations to make it plausible. But they failed on that point.

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