A leaked trailer for Transformers: Reactivate shows off the only lick of gameplay we'll likely ever see of the cancelled co-op action game

Back in 2022, Gears Tactics studio Splash Damage revealed that they were working on a Transformers game. It was called Transformers: Reactivate, and at the time was set to be a 1-4 player co-op action game, but come 2025 and the game gets canned all while parent company Tencent was going on a funding withdrawal spree in the games industry. Nothing substantial was ever really shown off of the game, but a trailer has now been leaked featuring what was apparently meant to be an internal look at it in action.

The trailer was shared by a Gwitter user called Nem who is devoted to "archiving and preserving Transformers: Reactivate because I need to cope somehow." Prior to the trailer itself, a message from Nem explained: "The following is an internal trailer not meant for the public, the music in it was released on October 21st 2024, placing this trailer at most three months prior to cancellation. With Tencent having pulled out in June/July 2024, this leads us to believe this trailer was made as part of an investment pitch to other publishers that ultimately failed."

Apparently by the time this trailer had been made, the game had shifted gears into a premium release, moving away from being a free-to-play live service game, complete with a story campaign that could be played solo or in online co-op. And the result is certainly a fairly real looking 2020s video game, at the very least. It's got some shooting, it's got some driving, it's got some shooting while driving, though it has surprisingly little actual transforming. Perhaps they were still ironing out the kinks mechanically and animationally.

This is one of those weird things where a big licensed game feels like it should have been a slam dunk, if only it had come out 10 years prior and wasn't catered towards the curse that is live service in the first place. I'm also always oddly eeked out by leaked trailers, not from some weird moral perspective, but because it's evidence of something existing, and yet is entirely impossible to engage with. What other medium has anything like this? Weird! I look forward to someone figuring out the solution to this. I'd suggest starting with dismantling capitalism, perhaps.