Niantic, Hasbro and TOMY Company are teaming up to publish TRANSFORMERS: Heavy Metal, an AR game that brings Optimus Prime and Bumblebee to life in the real world through the Niantic Lightship platform.
This is Niantic’s fifth attempt at AR gaming, following the early success of Ingress, a massive adoption of Pokémon GO and the disappointing release of Wizards Unite. With Catan: World Explorers remaining to be released, Transformers Heavy Metal seem to be a new project on the horizon. Unless they don’t jump the ship and start building crypto games.
We received a couple of screenshots in the press kit which we are allowed to share with our readers, so here we go:
In terms of game play, we don’t know a lot about the game at the moment, but we know the following:
- In “TRANSFORMERS: Heavy Metal,” players will join the Guardian Network, a group of humans who have banded together with the Autobots in a war against the Decepticons. As a Guardian, players will uncover hidden regions across Earth to find resources and battle Decepticons in turn-based battles, either solo or with friends.
- Seattle-based Very Very Spaceship has been selected as the development studio.
- The game has been in development for a while, not clear how long
- The game will enter soft launch in select countries soon, and global launch is planned for later this year.
Now, Very Very Spaceship is an interesting studio for sure. Read more below, most of the text was shared by the developers themselves here.
Very Very Spaceship
very very spaceship is a motley crew of space faring game designers, engineers and artists from the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
For the past three years, under the leadership of BAFTA winning founder Sean Vesce (Never Alone, Tomb Raider Series, Mechwarrior Series), theyt have been solving the problems of the unknown for incredible partners like Google, Niantic Labs, Microsoft, and others.
The team calls themselves “a tight knit group of makers thriving in our undiscovered future, making shared game experiences with AR, VR, Geolocation, Live Streaming and more”. They have an excellent itch.io profile where they share the little bits of creativity they produce and they share their gaming sessions on Youtube:
The team actually looks like a good fit to build something quirky on top of Niantic’s Lightship platform, which we’re assuming is actually the Niantic Real World Platform, but renamed to something easier to remember.
