Transformers: Galactic Trials
Released: October 11th, 2024
Developer: 3D Clouds
Publisher: Outright Games
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Switch, Xbox Series X/S
A Transformers racing game isn’t a bad idea. This Transformers racing game is an appalling idea.
I wouldn’t call Galactic Trials one of the worst racing games I’ve played because quite frankly it doesn’t deserve the distinction. Such levels of notoriety are reserved for games more significant in their awfulness, and this miserable excuse for software is far more disposable.
Transformers: Galactic Trials is certainly one of the most infuriating racing games I’ve ever played. It’s so fundamentally busted that races essentially come down to luck. If the physics don’t betray you, if the bounce pads work correctly, and if you’re not shot in the back too many times, victory will be yours. If we only counted the intentionally designed obstacles, it wouldn’t be a very hard game.
Galactic Trials is a blend of vehicular races and third-person shooting as characters switch between their alt and robot modes. It’s awful. Neither mode is integrated well and neither one is very good to begin with.
When it’s at its very best, a small bit of forgettable entertainment can be extracted. Exactly how long you stay entertained depends on how lucky you get in avoiding all the potential screwups. Even if it all performs smoothly, it’s a largely mediocre little spin-off.
Unless you’re truly desperate for a new racing game with Autobots and Decepticons in it, you’ll have much more fun if you pick one of the dozens of better racers and just pop some old Transformers cartoons on in the background.
Without its central gimmick, Galactic Trials is a threadbare arcade racer with absolutely nothing to say for itself. Races are thoroughly rudimentary and never feel particularly speedy. You can accelerate, you can drift, you can use Energon to boost, and you can dash horizontally to bash opponents on either side of you.
That’s it.
No weapons, no skills, no pickups outside of health and Energon, just the absolute basics. All the Transformers play the same way in their alt modes. Appearance and basic stats are the only difference. You’ve got your slow and tough vehicles, your fast and weak ones, and they’re all boring as hell.
Galactic Trials relies entirely on the transformation aspect to provide anything unique. What it provides instead is a terribly conceived bunch of shite.
At various points in a race, you’ll switch from vehicle to robot and stomp along routes of varying intricacy, shooting NPC enemies and other racers. There’s some truly terrible platforming involving bounce pads that sometimes fail to propel you properly. Nothing in the game can ever be trusted to work how it’s meant to.
As a robot, your aim is to simply reach the exit and get back on the road. Sometimes there will be turrets or a generator to destroy before the exit doors open. You can shoot them yourself or let your CPU-controlled opponents do it while you hang out by the door - you’re guaranteed a headstart by letting the dumbasses do all the work to let you out first.
Yeah, this game has been poorly thought out.
Shooting sections have a major glaring issue - players are inherently disadvantaged against anyone who’s behind them, because their backside becomes pure target practice. You could turn around and shoot back, but then you can’t see all the enemies and obstacles ahead of you.
All you can reasonably do is just run, shoot, and hope you get lucky.
While there’s a case to be made that these segments level the playing field, it’s just an awkwardly implemented mess. There’s certainly no fun in going from first to last place in an instant because you had five opponents shooting your ass and turrets shooting your face. When this happens right near a finish line, your loss feels like a mugging.
There are all sorts of ways Galactic Trials could have addressed this, such as making these sections pure PvE or replacing the racing aspect with an arena or something. Anything would be better than a clunky, counterproductive foot race with guns.
Even if it had done something less stupid, said combat is so shit it wouldn’t really matter. Robots control clumsily and feel way too floaty for giant metal people. Targeting is done automatically - the game will pick whatever enemy it feels is best while you hold the trigger down. This system is prone to indecisively flitting between multiple targets, but it can also stay locked onto things you’ve already run past or couldn’t hit to begin with.
Best you can do is move the camera in the direction of an intended target and hope the game takes the hint. Even then, trying to eliminate a specific opponent can be a hassle since they’ll be bouncing around and out of range a lot. It doesn’t feel like a real combat system at all, merely a weak excuse to justify using the Transformers brand.
Robot modes are as lacking as alt modes when it comes to appreciable differences. They all have access to the same guns and they all control the same. Of course they do. Why would the game offer any variety beyond the strictly obligatory?
Each Transformer has a unique ability as its only differentiator, which is usually some sort of one-shot attack. A few more interesting skills show up, such as Soundwave summoning Laserbeak, but they’re not enough to break the monotony. A large number of them are useless, requiring an accuracy this game is incapable of or a melee attack that slows you down more than it hits anything.
Characters can earn XP, with ten levels to attain. Each new level increases a stat. Yippee.
Guns are incredibly unsatisfying to use, especially since all you’re doing is holding down the fire button and letting the game do the rest. They feel ineffectual, with poor fire rates, small magazines, and low damage. Many of them behave so similarly they might as well not be there. Also, they look and sound like the plastic guns you’d find at a pound shop.
Why would Megatron need to use one of these peashooters anyway? He has a massive arm gun and turns into a tank. I’ve seen how often he can fire that cannon, don’t tell me it’s a special move he can only pop off once or twice per race.
To equip anything other than a crummy starter pistol, you need to get it as a random reward during what I’ll generously call a “campaign.” These guns can’t be kept for permanent use until their unlock requirements are met, which involves shooting a lot of specific targets. Between the randomness and the lengthy unlocks, obtaining a desirable weapon can be a grind.
Replay value is something Galactic Trials attempts to manifest through brute force, gating characters and items behind extensive unlock processes. It doesn’t take long to get sick of the handful of stages and indistinct characters - unlocks are the best the game can muster to keep anybody hooked.
You’re replaying a game to get more stuff for a game that isn’t worth replaying except to get more stuff, which is about as pointless as it gets. Galactic Trials is an exercise in digital futility.
On the easy and normal difficulties, races are brainless affairs with failure only really resulting from bugs, borked physics, or getting shot in the back.
“Prime” difficulty is a hot mess of bashing and shooting where your character choice determines if you’re too slow to be competitive or too frail to survive altercations. Even when I’ve been doing well on this setting, I’d always reach a race where one random opponent sticks to me like glue and surges ahead at literally the last second to steal the win.
I wanted to play as Arcee, but one of her five unlock requirements is completing a seven-race Trial on Prime difficulty as Bumblebee, so fuck that. Maybe I’d get her if I maxed out his levels or found super powerful rewards, but I could also play something else and have fun instead.
There’s a whopping total of two main game modes. You can play a Galactic Trial, which is a series of races, and a Championship, which is a series of races. No matter the mode, they all use the same tracks and the only differences between how either one works are minor.
The only other game type is Quick Match, where you do a single race on a course of your choosing. There’s nothing else to play.
Throughout your chosen mode you’ll be offered a choice of randomly offered rewards. These will either be a new weapon or a card with some form of passive bonus. Cards have varying rarities and more are added to the reward pool as you play. The most powerful cards, so-called Prime Artifacts, are awarded for completing a whole Trial. Sometimes. Not always.
The length of a Trial depends on the difficulty level, coming in sets of either three, five, or seven races. You only get three retries throughout an entire Trial, which seems unnecessarily punishing considering how easily you can lose a race through no fault of your own. It’s the main reason why Prime difficulty is so shit - slogging through that many races and then losing all progress is immensely discouraging.
It’s a charmlessly presented game, as well. From the basic menus to the fact each character endlessly repeats a few stock phrases, an atmosphere of lifelessness permeates everything.
A little bit of fanfare or flavor would have been nice. Besides a flimsy plot outline at the start, you’re given no real narrative, no cutscenes, not even a little victory animation when you win a mode. Completing a Trial just dumps you unceremoniously back into the basic menu as if nothing had happened. This is a bare-bones “product” that doesn’t have any heart.
Like I mentioned at the start, Galactic Trials is such an undercooked dog’s dinner that your real opponents aren’t the other racers - it’s the litany of ways in this game can fuck you over with its own mistakes. You can be driving along a straight road and suddenly violently skid sideways. You might hit an invisible bump in the road or come to a standstill for no reason. A bounce pad could randomly bonk your head on a ceiling, or your robot form will slide uncontrollably for a second.
And of course, the old classic - you might just clip through the floor into the void before.
Respawn positions after getting eliminated are horribly inconsistent. You might respawn exactly where you were or far behind you. You can spawn facing a bend in the road instead of the direction you should be driving. You could end up harshly going from near the exit of a combat segment right back to the entrance. On at least one occasion I fell into a death drop only to rematerialize directly above the drop and fall again.
Galactic Trials’ roster is pathetic. Four characters are available at the start with another seven to pick up after completing a bunch of objectives. With an average of five objectives per Transformer, a lot’s been done to further falsify the already artificial replay value. Adding grind is a lot easier than adding more characters with meaningful differences, after all.
The roster has significant omissions, with Jazz being one such conspicuously absent Autobot. Because the racetracks are road-based and nobody thought of having the planes just hover, many of the best known Decepticons are out as well. Yes, that includes my boy Starscream.
That said, Shockwave made the cut and appears to use his Cybertronian jet form. I guess the thinking is that alien planes are weird enough to not look too weird on the road. Far be it from a game where Optimus Prime readily kicks the shit out of Bumblebee to not make sense.
Despite many character designs evoking the classic Generation One era, my decrepit old ass doesn’t recognize half of the fuckers on show. Who the hell is Flamewar and why aren’t they Shrapnel? I’d look it up, but sometimes I don’t research things to show my utter contempt, and I am quite contemptuous of this game.
I like Shrapnel. Fuck Flamewar.
It doesn’t really matter because, recognizable or not, everything looks as visually impressive as dessicated testes. For a game that has the filthy temerity to charge forty bucks, Galactic Trials looks like a mobile game.
There’s a noticeable lack of detail with characters and environments. Everything is overly smooth and clean, leading to characters appearing somewhat flat. Everything resembles polished glass instead of metal, which is about the only way in which this game does look polished.
While I’m normally a fan of high saturation, there’s just something off with the game’s vivid color palette, best typified by the “gold” skins characters get at level ten, which makes anyone using them look like they’re made out of cheese.
Cosmetic unlocks are quite thin on the ground. Every Transformer has their default paint job, the cheese skin, and one other alternative. The alternative skins, without exception, are unappealing in the extreme. They’re either really drab or they feature colors that look hideous together.
That’s your lot for cosmetics. Like every other part of this game, it’s barely anything.
I wouldn’t be shocked if I learned Galactic Trials was a freemium game that had its predatory guts ripped out in exchange for a ludicrous retail price. By all accounts, this isn’t the case, but it certainly comes off like it is.
The automatic targeting feels like a shooter you’d play on a smartphone’s touchscreen, complete with a chunky overlay for small scale readability. Its art style and graphics evoke the milquetoast aesthetic I always see saturating app stores. Many of the unlocks are grindy and various rewards are obtained by opening loot boxes at the end of a run.
If the plan was always a full-fledged product and the similarities to mobile shovelware are merely coincidental, that’s actually quite sad.
Transformers: Galactic Trials is overpriced and full of nothing. The gimmick of switching between vehicular racing and robotic shooting might have worked if both halves weren’t so thoughtlessly welded together like a shoddy cut-and-shut car. Then again, its meager content and technical sloppiness suggests it never had a chance.
Also I’m still seething at the lack of Starscream.
3.5/10
