Transistor 2014

Is it still worth playing?

Supergiant Games' 2014 isometric action game for Windows and PlayStation 4. The singer Red loses her voice in an attack in Cloudbank, and the sword Transistor absorbs the attacked man, who becomes her guide and narrator, while Red fights the Process and uncovers the Camerata. Combat is real time, with a frozen planning mode called Turn that drains an action bar, which refills after a delay. Its tools are Functions. Red collects 16 of them from defeated enemies and equips each in one of four active slots, in the passive slot, or as an upgrade to another. Excessive damage overloads a function for a while, so the loadout has to be reshuffled. With so many ways to combine functions, the choice of build and of which enemy to hit first still matters today.