Completely Biased: Deformers (PS4)

Maybe the developers behind the game should change their name to Somewhat Ready At Dawn, am I right? Anyway, Deformers, from the minds behind The Order 1886 and those two PSP God of War games, seems like a step in a radically different direction for the studio and honestly, it shows. The game plays a lot like a concept that never evolved. It’s creative, cute, colorful and fun, but the fun certainly came last in the development of this $30-dollar game.

Gameplay is only one aspect of fun in a video game. The whole experience with the game can’t feel like it’s a chore. Unfortunately for Deformers, they didn’t seem to understand that concept because everything, and I mean everything, was a chore. The game consists of these little creatures who are all nice and squishy and they generally just go around ramming each other until one explodes and one is victorious. The idea behind that seems so stupidly simple and enjoyable that you think the rest of the game would be too.

Let’s start with problem number one, the game must be connected to the internet. I don’t hate always online games like Destiny or anything like that because it makes sense for those types of games, but when you can’t even edit your characters in the workshop or play locally because the game can’t connect to the internet, you have made some very poor design choices. And let’s talk about the customization for a second. With the price of all the accessories and various items and how much money you earn via their level up system, it’s clear that Ready At Dawn is pushing to have you buy their in game currency through the PlayStation store, Xbox Marketplace, etc. I ranked up quite a bit in the game before trading it into GameStop and all I could afford was a blue hat. A little blue hat to put on my squishy friend. What kind of reward system is that?

The second big problem that needs to be address are the servers. They are terrible. I found myself lucky not just be in a full game, but a game period. It didn’t matter what mode I was playing, it would always struggle to connect and then when it did, I never got booted, but I always seemed to see a bunch of players just leaving left and right. It was very unfortunate because I loved ramming into my enemies and making them go splat, but that fun started to diminish when there was only one chump running away from me and my posse.

The third and final problem are the modes. They are incredibly bland. While the character choices are different enough to make a real impact, you really only have two modes because team deathmatch and deathmatch don’t do much to change things up so you’re basically left with some type of deathmatch and what they call Form Ball. If you want to play a soccer based game where you can charge into people and have them explode, you might as well just play Rocket League. I was very disappointed that their soccer mode was unpolished and uneventful. They didn’t have cool extra powers to help you out or something. It was just boring and after about five games of it I was done.

Deformers is a good idea, but a missed opportunity. Maybe next time, Ready At Dawn. Maybe next time. (Isn’t that what everyone said after The Order 1886?)

Verdict: Save your money. Buy Rocket League.

Written by G. S. Martin