Transformers: The Game Review

Ten minutes into playing Transformers: The Game, even without seeing the logos and introductions, I could tell that it was a Traveler’s Tales game. The team recently put together the LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Star Wars II titles, which were entertaining hop-and-bop action/platformers with tons of Star Wars humor. Strangely, Transformers: The Game played exactly like those titles. And unfortunately, some of its game mechanics and missions made it one of the least enjoyable games I’ve played this year. I’d hope that the movie is better, as I haven’t seen it.

To start, Transformers lets you choose between the good-guy Autobots or the bad-guy Decepticons. The storylines play out quite differently, as the Decepticons entertain you with missions that allow you to simply blow up everything around you while taking out enemies and completing objectives. The Autobots, however–who I started to play as first–throw out some incredibly dull missions, and some became so repetitive that I just wanted to snap the disc in half. There were missions in the Hoover Dam level as well as at the end of the storyline that made me so angry that I again wanted to snap the disc in half. After a while, it seemed to me like the only thing I wanted to transform was the shape of my PS3 disc into two separate halves.

At least running around and breaking stuff was kind of fun. Transformers reminded me a lot of a poor man’s Crackdown; in the open world the robots could climb up buildings and jump from roof to roof, and throw cars or other large objects at each other to hurt each other. Unfortunately, shooting your explosive missiles and machine guns didn’t seem to do any damage to anything in the game except for pesky police vehicles. Shooting an enemy almost never resulted in damage, as most Transformers were equipped with energy shields that blocked projectiles. It made the fancy weapons useless and reduced the number of pretty explosions and smoke effects. I also wondered why Traveler’s Tales decided to pave the roads with an invisible layer of permafrost–controlling vehicles was nigh impossible at certain speeds, and transforming in and out of robot mode took all control away from you during the change. Fumbling with base things like this shouldn’t be an issue with a next-gen game at this point.

Those explosive and smoke effects I mentioned are some of the few visual perks that Transformers utilizes to wow the eyes–this looks like a high-res Xbox game with a decent frame rate, at least on the PlayStation 3 version I played on a 1080i resolution and 16:9 alignment. The robots animated roughly (except when they transform, that always looks cool) and felt kind of slippery, and nothing in the environment projected a feeling of weight–cars felt like they were made of foam. Even if you rammed a tank driving a small coupe, the tank would fly much further and be far more damaged. It was quite ridiculous, but the wacky physics actually provided a fair amount of laughs and entertainment value. If a flaw produces entertainment like that, heck, I’ll overlook it. As a final visual note, I questioned the cut-scene style utilized here: it was almost exactly like LEGO Star Wars, where characters interacted humorously with few words or limited expressions in a sparse environment. Unfortunately, here, the graphics looked terrible in the clips. The super-blurry environments made it seem like you were watching low-quality YouTube videos. At least the soundtrack was good. As I played the game I was pretty satisfied with the orchestral tracks that almost had to have been ripped right off of the film’s soundtrack. The sound effects were quite explosive, and since there was usually a lot going on, this was a loud game. Explosions and collapsing environments will rock the bass on your television. Too bad I thought the voice-overs were terrible, and I was annoyed any time a Transformer spoke. It was especially annoying to deal with voice-over when I was exploring and collecting things, as the overseer constantly barked orders to continue the storyline.

The unforgivable sin, in the end, is lack of multiplayer. Transformers could have made a decent online game, especially for hardcore fans from the 1980’s, where one’s favorite Autobot or Decepticon could duke it out against everyone else’s favorites, or objective-based games like Capture The Flag could have been implemented. Transformers: The Game would have sold enough copies to be worth its weight for online multiplayer, as the user base would be higher–it just boggles my mind why this isn’t included, it would have made the game worth renting at least. Lack of multiplayer aside, Transformers fails to provide a ton of replay value with its two storylines–each one takes only a few hours to complete, plus a few more hours if you plan on seeking out all or a lot of the collectible items and goodies scattered across the levels.

Overall, Transformers: The Game possesses the ability to entertain–its open-world gameplay and hundreds of collectible items and unlockable goodies make it a good game to entertain the type of gamer who scoured Vice City and Liberty City for Hidden Packages. It will also entertain younger children who enjoyed the movie, although its difficult missions might prove to be too much for an inexperienced child to handle. And of course, the die-hard fans from the 1980’s might just want to feel the rush of transforming from a destructive robot to a super-quick jet–that crowd might also want to take a look. Everyone else has seen what this game has to offer–button-mashing combat, repetitive seek-and-destroy and fetch quest missions, and other general sandbox mechanics that have been done better elsewhere. Point is, skip Transformers: The Game unless it kills you to.