Transformers: The Game

The Good
Let's be honest here. There's nothing better than being Optimus Prime, blowing up a Decepticon and saving mankind. Although chocolate cake would go down nicely right about now, especially with the current sour taste left in my mouth, mainly due to the lack of sweet, sweet action that this little title provides.

There are a few bright spots that I'll attempt to pick through and provide here, though I do warn you they are few and far between. Might as well start with the visual presentation, which in all reality is the best representation of the Transformers so far within a video game setting. All the eye candy you would expect is here, whether it's destroying a building via fist or missile, flying around the open air while taking down jets, or simply driving across the open highway and enjoying the view.

Yeah ... I'm being sarcastic. Sure, there's some decent pixels floating in and out, and the Transformers themselves are detailed enough, but due to the many problems that plague the game (which I'll mention below), any eye candy Activision were hoping to provide were lost within the myriad of boring levels. The transformation animation is only cool after the first few, after that you kinda forget all about how good it originally might have been.

The only other possible positive I can bring to the table having played the game would be the audio experience. There's plenty of loud bangs, Autobot chatter, etc, and the musical score provides a little added excitement to the action sequences, and believe me it needs all the help it can get.

There's a handful of extras to run through during the game, but finding all the hidden items won't take up too much of your brain power, and just about all the content you'll find can be found on the net just as easily, which is a shame. Still, the G1 characters add something, I guess.

The Bad
Now, on to the bad parts. Where, indeed, should I begin...

Once you get over that initial 'cool, I'm Optimus' stage, everything goes downhill quickly. You'll soon discover, as I did (very quickly, too), that the game resorts to either blowing stuff up or chasing someone down. In truth, that's what Transformers is all about anyway, but that doesn't make an entertaining gaming experience, and that's the case right here. Each mission just repeats a similar adventure to the last, just in either a different location or a different enemy objective. Same dog, different hairstyle. Sure, perhaps the same could be said about Call of Duty or Gears of War, but at least they make things interesting, in a number of ways the development team failed to consider.

Each level has to be 'found' by running to a certain point on the map. Yes, you can explore the surrounds and find the hidden items and challenges (kinda pointless though, under the circumstances), but it all becomes another boring way of providing some kind of open ended gameplay. Copying the Spider-Man way of thinking, since this is an Activision title, doesn't always work.

The characters themselves all play out much the same way, too. Despite the fact that they all have their own strengths within the comic book and movie franchise, they all seem to be clones of each other here, attacking with melee weapons or shooting from a distance. It would have been a far greater experience if, say, one character could heal another, or use a radar jamming system ... anything like that, really, would have done better than what's provided.

I did, though, have more fun blowing things up as a Decepticon, which is a good and bad thing. Good that at least there's something fun to do here, and bad since the Autobots should be the characters people want to play, not the evil ones. Okay, okay, maybe I'm being too 'nice' about my gaming habits, but seriously, running around as Optimus? Who wouldn't want to do that?!

Activision really missed the boat, too, by not providing a multiplayer option, or any online modes. Fighting with a friend and co-operating in taking down enemies would have done wonders to this games' lastability, among other things. And without any extra content to download, or online leaderboards to consider, the game itself comes and goes amazingly quickly ... unless you get bored with it half way through and change discs to something more appealing.

That's the thing that got me, in the end. How can a game developer, with so much content to work with, come up with something so boring? The logical answer, the one that comes up far too often in movie to video game translations, is that they simply didn't have the time to delve deeper.

Feature films are shot, edited and scored within two to three years, on average. Video games, at least the good ones, have a development cycle of two years or more. However, when dealing with a movie license, developers normally come on board a third or half way through the movie's development, leaving them with less than two years to have a finished product. That, of course, leaves us with far too many games based on movies that fall flat time and again, while development houses pick up the cash from consumers who hope, more often than know, if the game is worth the effort and buy it on the off chance that this time someones done the job.

The Bottom Line
It's a shame, really. Just a little more imagination and this game could have really taken off. Instead, I'm left to ponder what could have been. The amount of times I was left frustrated by the games poor design, it really did get to a point where I stopped despite really wanting to see if it improved over time, simply because it's just that bad. I didn't want to admit it at first, it looked really good from the opening sequence. But it quickly became clear how slow and poor Prime has become in his 'older' age.

I'd say stay well clear, but if you really want to give this a try (for one reason or another), the Xbox Cybertron Edition will no doubt be found at a cheap price at your local store.

At least the movie was good.