The second project of the authors of Bastion unexpectedly – without announcements and promises – appeared on the virtual shelves of the App Store.
The developers from the California independent studio Supergiant Games consider their game, like Bastion, to be role-playing action games. Only Transistor is very far away, both in terms of plot presentation and mechanics, from analogues, like Dungeon Hunter or Titan Quest.
The combat component of Transistor, in which the player spends most of his time, is much closer to the classics of Bioware – Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age. The similarity is due to the ability to pause the game, within which the user must set a chain of actions for the character.
But, of course, there were nuances here. It is not possible to pause at every moment, the length of actions in the chain depends on the strength and number of actions being set, the setting of which is a separate large meta-game.
In terms of storytelling, the project, like the debut of Supergiant Games, has also gone far from the analogues of the genre. The developers again placed special emphasis on off-screen narration, commenting on the events taking place by the narrator. And it worked again.
As for the setting, then the developers allowed themselves a bolder experiment. If Bastion was more or less a classic fantasy with a slight flair of steampunk and references to oriental games, then Transistor is a colorful cyberpunk made in an art deco manner (and, by the way, with an amazing soundtrack).
On PC and PS4, the conditional realtime Transistor appeared in May last year. Its sales on Steam with a price of $ 20 amounted to more than 500 thousand digital copies (according to SteamSpy). The average rating in the same place is off-scale 96%.
On iOS, Transistor will cost $9.99. The game is optimized only for devices no older than iPhone 5, iPad 4 and iPad mini 2.
Have you played the game on iOS? What do you think, how well did the developers manage to port the project to the mobile platform (Confetti Games, which transferred Vainglory to Android, was responsible for this, by the way)?