After last year’s Ghostbusters game, it’s time for another old franchise to be revived in video game form.  The movie revival of Transformers (and everything that spawned from it) was relatively terrible, especially the second one, so I was skeptical about the attempt to revive the franchise as a video game. But it was still nice to see it had nothing to do with those lame movies, so some part of me was hoping we’d have a success in our hands, just like Ghostbusters was.

The game has been receiving stupidly high amounts of praise and hype, so my expectations were a bit elevated by that before I started playing.

Read on and see if it really warrants that high amount of praise!

Developer: High Moon Studios
Publisher: Activision
Date of Release: June 22nd 2010
Platforms: Playstation 3, PC, Xbox 360

Genre: Third-person shooter
Rated T for Teen

Presentation/Story
The game, rather than having anything to do with the Michael Bay pieces of shit, is based on the original 80s Transformers cartoon. It takes place before the original cartoon. Before the Transformers get to Earth, and before Optimus is named Optimus Prime. The game has 2 campaigns: first the Decepticon campaign and then the Autobot campaign.

The Decepticon campaign puts you in the role of multiple evil transformers to gain the power of Dark Energon, and to take over Cybertron, fighting powerful Autobot weapons and strong Autobots. The Autobot campaign starts right after the Decepticon campaign, and requires you to attempt to save Cybertron from the Decepticons. The story itself is rather simple, but it’s still pretty entertaining. I think what makes it more enjoyable is the banter between the characters as you’re travelling through the levels. On the Autobots side it’s not too great (though there are some funny lines from time to time), but on the Decepticon side the random dialogue during level is very entertaining. Overall it’s an okay story.

On the graphical side of things… Well, I usually criticize games for having bland and boring color palettes, but here it’s understandable. I mean, Cybertron is a machine planet. It’s all dark and gray, if it was any different and more colorful it would just be wrong. As for the robot design, well it uses the old 80s cartoon’s designs… almost. Every Autobot and Decepticon looks like they would in the cartoon, but here they’re a bit… bulkier than they originally were, and not exactly as colorful. What I think is that they gave a slightly darker look than the original cartoons, to appeal a bit more to people who were fans of the original (now that they’re older, of course), and I actually like how it came out. Everything looks like what Transformers should look like, just a bit darker.

Sound-wise I have no complaints. The voice acting is near perfect, all of the transformers sound great. The transforming sound effect is back and as awesome as ever, though it’s a bit more subtle. The rest of the sound effects are standard explosions/gunshots and such. The music is metal-ish/rock-ish stuff, pretty fun to listen to, but unmemorable.

The presentation is very good, and any fans of the original cartoons should be quite happy with it, especially since many fan favorite transformers are in the game.

Gameplay
The game is a Third-Person Shooter. It’s as standard as the genre gets. You point at things and shoot them. You can zoom in to increase your weapon’s accuracy, but it makes you slower. You have a few types of weapons: a few Grenade types (healing, damaging, stunning), Machine Guns (assault rifles, Gatling guns), a few sniper rifles, and a few rocket/grenade launchers. Oh, and a repair gun that’s pretty much useless in single-player (I leave it to AI controlled allies just in case they have a moment of intelligence and decide to heal me). You can carry 2 guns at once, and one grenade type. Each transformer also has 2 abilities: there’s a shield, a whirlwind attack, a dash, and a shockwave. And you have a melee attacks that kills any minor grunts in one hit.

For health, you have 4 small bars. Each bar takes a certain amount of damage. You do have regenerating health, but only for health bars that aren’t fully depleted. If you lose all of one of the 4 health bars, it won’t regenerate, and the only way to replenish it is to find an Energon cube which fully replenishes your life. I like this system, since you can’t fully rely on just staying out of harm’s way to be at full health. Oh and there’s no cover system, so there’s no near-foolproof defense by crouching behind small walls, and enemies are constantly flanking you anyways. To me, not having a cover system is better.

Each Transformer can transform into a vehicle: either a car or a plane (yeah, Optimus becomes a car rather than a truck…). Control-wise the car and plane control the same, except that, if you point up and go forward, you start flying if you’re a plane. And both the plane and the car control just like the normal transformer. The only major difference is that sometimes the transformed versions have infinite ammo, and all vehicles have the ability to turbo boost. The turbo boost is hard to control, at least with mouse and keyboard, since any slight movement of the mouse will make the vehicle go crazy, so you have to be very precise. But still, it feels a bit cheap that the vehicle are really just a third gun in your arsenal rather than anything that feels different than the un-transformed transformer. The vehicles do have some uses (especially the planes), but not as cool as you’d expect.

The game flow is quite simple: go somewhere, kill all the enemies, activate a switch or two, kill more enemies, go to the next part, kill more enemies, activate more switches, and continue like that until you’re done with the level, rinse and repeat for all 10 chapters of the game. There’s occasional boss fights or small “obstacle courses” to make it a slight bit less repetitive, but it’s pretty much all the same thing all the time. There’s no gameplay variety.

Problems
Other than the repetitiveness, I have a few problems with the game.

The biggest problem to me is the AI for the 2 partners that follow you around. In every mission you’re always in a group of 3 transformers, so 2 of them are CPU-controlled. And they SUCK. They’re completely useless, and, at parts, they even become a nuisance. Getting in your way (Transformers are pretty big, them getting in your aim is rather annoying), preventing you to move around by just standing there doing nothing, and generally not helping you out when you need to. They never heal you even when they have the healing gun, they barely shoot enemies and have terrible aim… they’re useless. You’re doing everything yourself all the time, it feels rather pointless to have the CPU-controlled allies at all.

Then there’s the fact that all the Transformers play exactly the same. The only big differences between them are whether they become planes or cars, and which weapons they have when they transform (some even have the same mix of abilities, and starting weapons don’t matter much since you can take whichever weapon you find during a level). That’s very disappointing.

The difficulty is also a problem. Almost any part that killed me didn’t feel like I died because I was not playing properly, it felt that I died because there was nothing I could do against it. That’s difficulty by bad design, rather than proper difficulty. Not that it’s very hard anyways, but the hard parts are cheap rather than being an actual challenge, making the difficulty based more on luck than skill.

Overall
While the presentation is great, the gameplay feels a bit on the cheap side. It doesn’t really feel any different than any other TPS out there, minus the lack of a cover system. It doesn’t really feel like you’re playing a Transformers game, despite the whole transforming into vehicles thing, it feels like a random TPS with the Transformers 80s design slapped on top.

Using last year’s Ghostbusters game as an example… Ghostbusters did have fairly standard TPS gameplay, but it had multiple of its own twists on the genre to really make it really feel like you were playing as a Ghostbuster, and, because of that, it was a great game. Transformers just feels… like any other TPS out there. There’s nothing unique about it.

That being said, it’s still a solid game. While incredibly repetitive (there’s literally only one mission type), it’s fun to play, there’s some fun boss fights, and the presentation will please any Transformers fan. It’s a fine game, though very far away from greatness. A few extra months of development would have been better. I’m not entirely sure why it’s getting so much praise, but then again modern gamers have the tendency to overly praise games that are just a bit above average.

Pros and Cons
Pros
- True to the original cartoons, but with a slightly darker look
- Gameplay isn’t too bad
- Sounds are great
- Cheesy 80s rock tune during the ending credits

Cons
- VERY repetitive, it can get boring pretty fast
- Rather short
- The kinda tough parts in the game are tough because they’re cheap, not because of well-designed difficulty
- Not a whole lot of weapon variety
- AI partners are COMPLETELY useless
- All the transformers play pretty much identically (other than the obvious difference between flying and ground-based transformers)

The Save Factor
2 Save Factors for this one. It has a starting price of $60 on consoles, and $40 on Steam (PC).

If you plan on playing multiplayer and co-op campaign, the Save Factor is $35.
If you plan on just playing the single-player campaign, the Save Factor is $20.

Full price just isn’t worth it unless you’re a hardcore Transformers fan.

jobocan Console, Games, PC, ps3, Review, xbox 360