Doesn't hold up to modern standarts gameplay-wise. Story is a little convoluted, but manageable. Artwork and music are beautiful, but I beat the game in 3 hours and was GLAD it's over. IMHO, Bastion is a better game as a package.

Not really sure how this one got so high in ratings.

The combat just didn't do it for me, which is a shame since I thought with all the coding references in there I would have a fun time. Too many enemies that are repetitive and boring to fight, yet you can't just evade and walk through them. Near the endgame got particularly boring in gameplay with all of the enemies just being "Man" types on loop.
Beat one of them? Cool, now this guy is going to say a line and wait for you to get to the next screen.... where you have TWO of them to beat up! Done? Alright time for another line, move along to next screen... and behold! Now we have THREE of them! Beat that too? aw damn... alright, next screen, HA! How about now! There's FOUR of them!!

Then also got versions of them with bigger, flaming heads of different colors... but who mostly have the same moveset anyway so same ♥♥♥♥.

Now, Narratively, this makes sense. Process is taking over and assimilating the existing beings, and they're shown to be getting somewhat human with the 5 tiny bots earlier happily taking pictures of the art of Red on the wall like fanboys... until Red walks in front of them without doing any harm and they go murder mode again. That was pretty odd. Regardless, they're evolving, so considering man as a higher evolution form *Would* make sense, if not for the giant Spine thing that I'm sure is a superior form to try to get to.
But still, multiple, multiple screens of facing the same enemy again and again with a system that I was not really into is quite the drag.


Story is average too. Sure the city itself is described to some extent via the terminals and all that, but the existence of other places in their world? Supposedly exists given the Transistor guy asking Red if she wanted to skip town, just the two of them. But no real details whatsoever. Makes the Camerata look even dumber if they don't like this "Overdemocratized world" where even the most mundane things have mass polls and no free agency at all, but supposedly it's the only town in the world like that and they never thought to give up on that one place and go elsewhere. Nope, must try to mess things up with clearly unknown otherworldly machinery with no information on how the hell you even found anything about the Transistor being able to control them, Cradle link, or anything else.

This game could have benefitted a LOT more from having either more destruction and suffering seen about other people, who we basically don't encounter at all for most of the game, and interactions with either them, or even just more time and interactions with the Transistor guy instead of screen upon screen of enemies showing up to highlight the combat, which isn't even the best thing about this game. Feels like a pretty barebones world by most isometric game standards, which is a shame given the world background does look fairly well done. Music is good... when it exists. Which is basically just in a key story segment or two (Ending in particular was very nice), else it's just humming everywhere or battle OSTs that were not particularly impressive either.

Even at a much lower price I wouldn't be impressed by this game at all, and at this price? No way.

Beautiful game.

This one has a special place in my heart because I think its the first game I bought for my computer.