Beyond Reality Redux Transforms $20 Into Disappointment

Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux is the new Quest port of Transformers: Beyond Reality, an arcade-style on-rails VR shooter that debuted on PlayStation VR in 2022 before making a surprise appearance on PlayStation VR2 in 2023.

While Redux adds some minor gameplay improvements for its Meta headset release, the overall experience is bland, visually downgraded, and disappointingly unpolished.

Beyond Reality Redux is a fairly straightforward on-rails shooter. For those who may not be familiar with the term, think of games like Virtua Cop, Time Crisis, and The House of the Dead. As in those venerable arcade classics, Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux has you moving automatically through a series of environments while enemies appear in front of and around you. Your job is to shoot them until they explode. At the end of each of the game’s six stages, there’s a boss battle.

In games like these, the only action you can really take is to shoot stuff. In House of the Dead, shooting stuff makes zombie heads explode, which is satisfying. In Time Crisis’ arcade cabinet, shooting stuff makes a real-life gun recoil, which is exciting. In Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux, shooting stuff does almost nothing.

Sure, enemies explode, bosses flop, and you eventually beat the game. But nothing about shooting stuff in Transformers is very engrossing. You hold down the trigger and your weapon fires continually with all the speed and power of a little, green inchworm. There’s almost no sense of destructive force or feedback when your shots connect. It’s deeply humdrum.

There are too few enemy types, and the differences between them aren’t significant enough to make encounters feel varied or interesting. All-too-similar, if not identical, enemies appear stage after stage to absorb a handful of shots and disappear in a small explosion. Occasionally they’ll fire back at you, requiring you to dodge their attacks, block them with a shield, or deflect them with a sword. But none of these mechanics are particularly fun, either!

Rather than feeling like an action hero caught in the middle of a Transformers battle, I often felt like I was giving the worst PowerPoint presentation of all time. I simply pointed my laser gun at whatever Decepticon had floated into my periphery while holding my shield up to deflect any lasers that happened to be shot my way.

There’s almost no challenge, no strategy, and no satisfying aural, visual, or haptic feedback to make any of it feel worthwhile. There’s no sense of weight or force behind the game’s action, which is especially disappointing in a game set in a world where giant robots habitually punch each other in the face.

This disappointment extends to the visuals, too, with this Quest port looking substantially worse than the earlier PSVR2 release. Textures appear to be missing entirely, and character models and environments are noticeably lacking in detail. Lighting is bland, environments are generic, and visual effects are weak. Given the relatively simple nature of the gameplay, the visual downgrade is particularly difficult to overlook.

There are moments when the Transformers license provides a little magic. When one of the giant Transformers appears in front of you, there’s something undeniably exciting about seeing these big burly ‘bots rendered at such an enormous scale. Unfortunately, the novelty wears off almost immediately because the Transformers themselves don’t get to do very much.

A typical encounter goes like this: A recognizable bad-guy Transformer appears and says something snarky. A recognizable good-guy Transformer appears and says “Oh, no you don’t!” The two Transformers have a six-second wrestling match, and then they fall off a cliff, or fly away, or run off down a corridor, shouting “Human, save the day!”

It’s a fun premise in theory; you’re humanity’s last hope because Optimus Prime has a concussion. But despite the game ostensibly trying its darnedest to make you feel important, nothing in the gameplay reinforces that.

It doesn’t help that the story is similarly uninspiring. The narrative exists largely to move you from one shooting gallery to the next, and the dialogue and exposition aren’t compelling enough to get or keep me invested in what happens. By the time the third or fourth Transformer shows up, I wasn’t thinking about how I could help save the planet. I was thinking about taking off my headset.

Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux Review – Final Verdict

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a simple arcade shooter. Especially in VR, on-rail shooters can be great. But arcade shooters live or die on the quality of their moment-to-moment action. The weapons need to feel fun to use, enemies need to be satisfying to destroy, and encounters need to provide some combination of tension, spectacle, challenge, or surprise. Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux doesn’t deliver any of that.

Instead, there‘s one main weapon, a couple of super weapons (which are equally unsatisfying to use), six all-too-similar campaign stages and a seemingly endless arcade mode, none of which really compels you to play or to keep playing.

Fans of the ‘bots may find some appeal in being able to see their favorite characters up close, to hear the iconic voice actors, and watch Optimus Prime and Megatron duke it out for a few moments at full scale. But fans who have access to PSVR2 are better served to buy the original game rather than this subpar Quest port. And for Quest-only players, there are many other more satisfying ways to spend twenty bucks and a couple of hours in a Quest headset.

Halfway through my complete playthrough of Transformers: Beyond Reality Redux’s campaign, I wasn’t really having any fun. Instead, I found myself wondering what exactly was stopping me from shaking off the headset, firing up my PlayStation 2, and playing Time Crisis.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.