It’s a shame that our first look at Transformers: Reactivate gameplay arrives just after the game is cancelled

Transformers: Reactivate was officially cancelled this week when developer Splash Damage announced that it’s ceasing development of the online shooter after years of work and plenty of silence. We’d never actually seen any gameplay from the doomed project, but the first footage, ironically, just started appearing online.

Reactivate switched to Unreal Engine 5 during its development, and this footage appears to have been captured after that shift.

The footage comes courtesy of DpzLuna on Twitter, an account dedicated to sharing news about the game, what little of it there was, anyway. It’s a gameplay clip that’s over six-minutes-long, showing some fairly basic combat from the perspective of a single Transformer.

Transformers: Reactivate was a shooter, after all, so much of the action involves shooting, with the occasional transforming in between. It appears turning into a car was the main means of traversal around the map, which looks to have been fairly big.

You could also shoot in car mode, and the animations of all of that look pretty good. The shooting looks to have heft to it, too, with chunky sound effects and meaty recoil. The combat shown, however, is against indistinct AI enemies, not Decepticons

From the looks of it, Reactivate likely had an open-world structure where players could freely roam around and pick objectives to tackle. Some of those include fairly standard stuff like clearing an area of enemies.

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While the footage clearly came from an in-development build with many missing assets, there is some promise to this. That said, in the wake of multiple live service disasters in 2024, like the crash and burn of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and the release and subsequent un-release of Sony’s Concord, one has to wonder if the powers that be looked at Reactivate and didn’t believe it could stand a better chance in the current market.

Nevertheless, it’s sad to see the work of a studio as talented as Splash Damage go to waste. It always feels like a team who’s one game away from a hit, so it’s extra frustrating to see that potential unrealised.