The next Transformers game will be a combat-racing roguelite

TRANSFORMERS: Galactic Trials | Announce Trailer | US | ESRB - YouTube

The tough thing about making a Transformers game is that you can't just make an action game about giant robots. You've also got to be able to handle the vehicle side of things, and there aren't a lot of studios out there who are equally adept at making racing games or flight sims as they are at making big robot action games.

Transformers: Galactic Trials, in development from 3DClouds, seems to be leaning more heavily on the racing side of things. The singleplayer mode has you traversing "battle-race circuits" that consist of both combat and driving challenges you have to face in the relevant forms, while collecting Prime Relics that can be spent to improve skills as well as unlocking more characters and skills. The press release says it has a "rogue-lite combat elements", which presumably means permadeath but with persistent level-ups.

You can play as a bunch of different Autobots and Decepticons, including Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Arcee, Wheeljack, Elita-1, Megatron, Shockwave, and Soundwave. It seems like the characters who don't traditionally transform into land vehicles will be getting alt modes that give them new truck or motorbike forms or whatever for this game, since rolling out as a guy who can turn into a stereo is probably not the best way to win a race.

There's a plot involving Nemesis Prime, who is probably Optimus Prime's evil clone or alternate-reality twin depending on your continuity of choice, running around stealing Prime Relics, but I can't imagine it'll be the focus of the game. As well as the singleplayer Galactic Trials mode, it'll have a local multiplayer arcade mode for two players.

Transformers: Galactic Trials is due out via Steam on October 11. Meanwhile, Splash Damage is apparently still plugging away at the post-apocalyptic Transformers: Reactivate, which we first saw announced at the Game Awards in 2022, and expect to hear more about later this year.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.