TRANSFORMERS: Battle Tactics review

Game Play

Transformers Battle Tactics is a PvP battle game where you assemble a group of Transformers and duke it out against other people live to see who built the better team. This title is unique because you can use both Autobots and Decepticons together in your team and the entire game takes place online in PvP battles.

Here’s how the game works. There are various parts of the menu that do various things. Using the menu you can manage abilities, your team, enter into the chatroom, obtain out-of-battle drops, the settings, and once you join one, you can check out your league there and you have a dedicated league chat should you want to use it. This is also how you engage in battles which we’ll get to in a second.

During battles, you earn resources that you can use to repair, upgrade, and recruit other characters that you gradually unlock as you level up. If you want to go a bit faster, you can use coins that you gradually earn or you can buy them. I know not a lot of people like this paradigm but take it from me, you can still enjoy the game without them.

Everything else is frosting on the cake. The global chat lets you talk to people and leagues allow you to join up with friends or strangers on the web to gain additional advantages. There is also a section where you can get free resources through drops. The game gives you two different ones that you can use at various time intervals or you can buy more with coins.

Mechanics

Okay folks, let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this game: the battles, the characters and the abilities. To engage in battle, you have to have use Energon which is this game’s energy counter. If you have no Energon, you can’t battle and you must wait for some to be replenished.

All battles are played against real life opponents with no exceptions. Truth be told, some battles you’ll absolutely dominate and others you’ll be totally dominated, but in the battles I took part in, the vast majority were decided on tactics with a little bit of luck thrown in.

Every round, a coin flips to decide who gets to go first. As far as I can tell, it is totally randomized and you can increase your chances with buffs, although the advantage really isn’t that big. There were rounds where I got first strike every round and there were rounds where I got none so at least it’s mostly fair.

From there, your team attacks the opposing team and vice versa and this continues however many rounds it takes before someone wins. OPPOnents can also back out, resulting in an instant victory for you. When you defeat bad guys individually you get resources and when you win, you get bonuses. If you lose, you still walk away with a little bit so it’s not totally worthless.

You can obtain various bonuses depending on a number of factors. Most playable characters have passive abilities give individual buffs. You can also assemble teams of certain playable characters and earn team bonuses that way. In battle, you can combine the powers of certain Transformers to create much more powerful attacks.

As you progress, you’ll level up your profile. As you level up your profile, you will have the ability to recruit new playable characters, unlock new abilities, and otherwise progress through the game.

The last thing I’ll talk about are the abilities. They range from re-rolling your damage to targeting a specific opponent and there are abilities that add buffs, damage opponents directly, and do all kinds of other stuff. You can equip four at once and every round in battle gives you three ability points that you can dump into these abilities to try to earn an advantage in battle.

Pros

Okay here’s what we liked about the game.

• It’s the good mixture of a serious game and a time waster. Battles are only about five minutes each so it doesn’t require a huge time commitment to play. On the flip side, the leveling up, unlockable content, and leagues offer surprisingly good depth that gives the game longevity.
• You have access to literally all of your favorite Autobot and Decepticon characters. You can mix and match or form teams based on who you like and I thought it was nice that you don’t have to pick sides this time. Just assemble a team of your favorites and go nuts.
• The game is very liberal with bonuses. You can get at least two free prize drops per day and you get Energon points for doing practically anything. Within my first hour I was able to recruit Optimus Prime twice and unlock four other additional characters along with three additional abilities. Yes, there are a few walls like running out of energy and there’s no getting around that fact, but it definitely handles these walls better than most.
• The game play mechanics, menus, and general game actions are simple to understand. There isn’t much of a learning curve to do anything here and that makes the game very accessible for casual gamers, kids, and pretty much everyone else.
• Transformers: Battle Tactics encourages people to play in leagues by throwing large league events. Unlike most games where only the top ten or so guilds actually win anything, this game gives rewards to the top 30,000 leagues which means practically everyone in a league gets something. Events in general are held weekly.
• There aren’t any Google Play Games services, but you can still manage a cloud save. It’s not super flexible but if you’re upgrading your device or you want to play on your tablet also, there is a built-in way to do that which we appreciate.
• Lastly, the game currently has over a million downloads, tens of thousands of leagues, and hundreds of thousands of active players. That means battles are generally easy to find and there is, for now at least, a healthy player base to enjoy.

Cons

And here are the things we didn’t like so much.

• Yes, there could have been a short campaign mode. The tutorial was good enough to learn the basics, but it would’ve been nice to go on even a few missions to earn a bit of resources before being thrown to the wolves. It’s not that big of a deal because the matchmaking isn’t bad, but still more content is better.
• The game does get a tad repetitive after a while. Being able to unlock all the various Autobots and Decepticons, along with the battle powers and combo attacks help mitigate this as you are free to explore various combos, but we recommend not playing too much too fast your may get burned out.

Final Thoughts

Overall, this is a solid game. The mixture of quick playing and deep level growth is a paradigm I wish more simple games would pursue and this one did it about as well as you can do it. There is a surprising amount of content for a game that touts only live PvP battles and fans of the Transformers will most likely have a positive experience. The near constant events help keep you engaged which is always nice and they even have a huge event going on right now.

There are a few issues here and there but these are minor details and most of them have already been fixed. The game is free with in app purchases and it’s less than 50MB so you won’t lose anything by trying it out. Click the button below if you want to try it out.