From the sumptuously beautiful hand-drawn art style to another exemplary score provided by one Darren Korb, Transistor paints a gorgeous futuristic world of interlocking computer programs and systems, the battling of which is down to you - and your talking sword. Yes, with protagonist Red losing her voice (apart from some haunting humming every now and then) it's over to her sword (imbued with the soul of a dead man) to provide colour-commentary and quips on her behalf. Supergiant Games' latest features a brilliantly simplistic-looking (yet incredibly deep) combat system that that harkens back to forgotten PS2 gem Alter Echo's sensibilities of mapping out a string of attacks Sherlock Holmes-style, before you hit the execute prompt and cut a swathe through an opposition held in slow-motion. However, with each action (and movement itself) taking chunks out of an allotted amount of frozen time, you can only queue up so much before you must hit 'Execute' and watch everything unfold, forcing you to really crunch the stats and plan damage-allocation accordingly. Of course to fans of isometric hack n' slashers this may sound like something that derails the flow of combat, but you'll be in and out of this mode very frequently thanks to the touch of a button, and when you throw in the ability to stack hundreds of moves and abilities along the way before resuming gameplay, you can essentially map out a whole room's worth of destruction before watching your plans unfold in an explosion of gorgeous colour, animation and sound effects.
