Watched the five episodes. The art style is kinda interesting. It clearly tries to mimic the 'realism' of the movie (outside of the faces, which have no nuts/bolts and their mouths just move like they're on a t-1000, very fluid metal), but streamlined enough and with enough colors that the characters are all easily identifiable instead of the mess the movies make.
The exception are the decepticon footsoldiers, which as mooks, eh, who cares if they're all identical. They're pretty much glorified stormtroopers (aim just as bad too), and there just for the autobots to rip to shred every episode. Man, they outnumber autobots that badly, and they can't do shit, can they?
There definitely is a lower focus on humans, as there's thankfully only four of them. The agent who serves as the autobot's contact with the govt, Jack the kid who got roped in because he was admiring a bike (Arcee) right before some decepticons spotted her, Raf boring stereotypical boy genius, and Miko reckless idiot extraordinare.
The humans aren't entirely a bad group (outside of Miko, who as mentioned above is an idiot). They're still helpful in some ways (boy genius more than the others), but they're just as much of a problem for the autobots as well. They mostly just get lucky (or unlucky) and stumble onto shit that gets them further embroiled in this robot war and find something useful enough to keep the autobots from just squishing them (and boy have they've -got- to be tempted to squish Miko) 'accidentally'.
As annoying as I found Miko though, I think my main human gripe is Raf. Did they -have- to make him a kid genius and worse, make him look so utterly stereotypical nerd? Oh, and he can hack into the FBI mainframes and track a chipped agent, fix military tech that the giant advanced robot can't figure out...he can somehow do all this...and then he can't hack into some telescopes because plot demands he and the rest of the humans go out and duke it out with Soundwave. Riiiight.
Oh, and the arc involves zombie robots. Yes, zombie robots. Of which the first is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson! EXCITING!!! WOOOO!!!
All in all? ...eh, I think I'm going to pass on this show. The five episode arc didn't really make care in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, the art isn't that bad, and the voice acting actually is top notch...but I just kept wanting to slap my forehead at how much everyone kept passing the idiot ball over and over and over again like a hot potato. Just drop it and act competent, damn you all! You're getting outsmarted by a 12 year old kid who nobody can take seriously as a character!
And Peter Cullen being Optimus did this show no favors. It seems like he was just there to slam us with old cliches over and over, giving the nostalgic fanboys squee moments, and frankly I just rolled my eyes at most of the lines, and they had little to no impact for my nostalgia sensors. The generic "transform and roll out" line works fine, it's expected every time they're about to leave base, and that actually did make me smile.
But c'mon, "one shall stand, one shall fall"? Weak! Weak! WEAK! And that was sadly not the only rehashed line. They did try to vary it a little, I guess. Ratchet stole the "light our darkest hour" one and it sorta fit the moment I guess.
But yeah, attempting to appeal to nostalgia was a miserable failure. And like I said before, the sheer amount of idiot balls...
For anyone interested, the hub channel does have episodes 1-2, so it's not like it's illegal to watch those episodes if nothing else. Idiot ball count isn't quite as high in those two episodes either.
h43r: :jawdrop: :jawdrop: :jawdrop: