Transformers games have picked up steam (and appeared on Steam) in the last decade or so, when once they were painfully rare and painfully bad. It's gotten better! But there's still much room for improvement. Many corners of gaming where Transformers could visit, some obvious and some not - but there's far more you could be doing with Transformers than shooters with driving/flying sections. Keep reading for RAC's picks!

5. Kart Racer

4. Adventure Games

3. Hunting Games

You'd think this would be a no-brainer. Granted, kart racers as a genre have faded away for a large part, leaving only their progenitor Mario Kart standing. But a light, party-play oriented racing game where you could transform and attack the other racers? That'd be a lot of fun.This sub-genre of gaming was facing extinction until Telltale Games managed to bring it back. Heavy on story, with puzzles to solve and decisions to make that can affect the plot later on, there is more than enough story in Transformers to carry such a game. A Telltale More Than Meets The Eye/Lost Light game with input from James Roberts would make a lot of people very, very happy.This is a very small genre, but one that Transformers could make an interesting and unique entry into. In games like Monster Hunter and God Eater, a skilled hunter (or team of hunters) takes on a series of increasingly massive beasts in order to collect supplies and upgrade their gear. The games usually start slow, teaching you how to hunt and recognize monsters' attack patterns, but gradually ramp up into Dark Souls levels of difficulty.

How to convert that to Transformers? The one-shot Combiner Hunters set provides a great blueprint for this - and Arcee's greatsword even looks like something out of Monster Hunter. I'd play a game where you hunt Beastformers, Dinobots, and ultimately Combiners and even Titans in a heartbeat. Somebody please make this happen.



2. Dynasty Warriors

This is a little bit of a stretch to call it a genre, but... well, what else do you call a line of games with something like ten different spinoff series? And that's not counting the various clones that Bandai and others have put out for some of their properties. Tecmo-Koei's Dynasty Warriors has spun off to include a ton of other (mostly anime-inspired) properties such as Fist of the North Star, Berserk, Heroic Legend of Arslan, Attack on Titan, One Piece, The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest... and perhaps most crucially, the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise. That means there is already a little bit of a blueprint on how to include transforming robots in the 1-versus-1000 brawler format.

Another thing that Musou games (the Japanese name for the series) usually boast of are truly massive rosters of playable characters. Imagine a game with every character from the G1 cartoon playable, each with their own unique attack chains, super moves, and team attacks.



1. Role-Playing Games

And here we are at the most obvious and neglected. Some Transformers games have flirted with the idea by including elements of a proper RPG, and some of the other genres I've mentioned would use concepts that would go into the ideal Transformers role-playing game. But a full-service RPG in the Western school, that of Bioware and/or Bethesda, would be something to see.

Transformers has everything you could need for that baked right in: endless special skills and weapon options. Multiple alt-modes to customize. And story. So much story. Three and a half decades of story branching out in every direction as far as the eye can see. This has been sitting there, all this time, waiting to happen, needing to happen... all it needs is Hasbro's okay, and a licensee willing to give such a game the time and resources it needs to be the very, very best of its genre.