Obviously the visual design is great, but that's really the only nice thing I have to say about it. This is some of the most lethargic voice acting I've ever heard. A lot of the characters sound almost identical. Almost all of them sound like they're about to fall asleep. Characters have a tendency to speak very slowly too, sometimes leaving huge awkward pauses between words for dramatic effect I guess, but they do it sooooo often, most of the time when there isn't anything particularly dramatic being said, that it's just unpleasant.
For that matter, the dialogue itself feels off sometimes too, disjointed and awkward as if there's been some kind of poor translation from another language, but...there hasn't. This was made in America. The guy doing the voice of Starscream was the only one that seemed to be giving it any effort. The guy doing the voice of Optimus is kind of painful to listen to because he starts out trying to play the part with a Peter Cullen impression, but he can't seem to hold it for more than a few seconds at a time and just keeps slipping into a normal voice most of the time. It's pretty bad.
The pacing also has a kind of Dragon Ball Z feel to it (not a compliment). There's a lot of standing around very slowly talking about what's going on and what they're going to do, but not much actual doing. Mostly just a bunch of melodramatic posturing. When there is action it feels pretty clunky, which isn't all that surprising considering the big blocky designs of the characters. They're nice to look at when they're standing still, but they have a pretty low range of articulation in motion, which leads to some weird robo fist fights that feel like you're watching a game of Rockem Sockem Robots.
Honestly I haven't been excited by a new Transformers show since Beast Wars so I don't know why I had any expectations for this, but the trailers made it look like this could be something special, but sorry, just having the characters look like the good old G1 days isn't enough for me when everything else about it is so disappointing. I'd give it a 4 or 5 out of 10 at best.
