Review: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen

Transformers 2 is the biggest movie of the summer, so of course it’s got a videogame tie-in. I have to admit, having reviewed a ton of lisenced stuff over the past few months I expected the worst. I have to say, it wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated.

The game, a third person shooter that roughly follows the story of Michael Bay’s movie, sees you taking the path of the Autobots (the good guys) and the Decepticons (the bad guys). Your tasked with finding out what The Fallen is and, depending on what faction you’re playing, how you’re going to deal with it. At first glance, this might sound a cool concept. The ability to play through the story from two perspectives is something that gave me a shred of hope that this game could be good. Whilst this is something not usually seen in a move tie-in it’s still not enough to save this game from being the mediocre sack of nuts and bolts that it is.

I should have realised how bad the game was going to get when I entered the tutorial. Whoever thought it’d be a good idea to map three different functions onto the same button is clearly derranged. Instead of using a simple button press to allow you to change between vehicle and robot forms you use the R2. This would be all well and good if the same button wasn’t also used for shooting and accelerating. The most annoying this is, you have to hold R2 to stay in vehicle form meaning you can’t not accelerate.

Overall the controls are pretty terrible. They’re overly convoluted and making them simpler would have certainly helped my experience with the game. There are some different combinations of moves you can do, but it takes so much wasted effort to do them you might as well just stick with the standard attacks. That said, once you start attacking something it just drives away, leaving you chasing robots around the level.

Speaking of the AI, it’s pretty bad. I mean, I didn’t go into it expecting something amazing but there are just some really dumb things that the AI does here that make some levels super easy to finish. One of the biggest examples that I found was that when an enemy is close to a large structure, it will usually climb it. What this means is that you can just take pot shots at them, as they don’t even try and protect themselves. This usually leaves them dead or with very low health if they manage to get up. Once they’re up there they just stand there. They seem rooted to the spot unless you attack them and when you do they’ll only shift over a few feet. You can usually take them out pretty easy with a few missiles or head shots. Note to the devs: making something super easy is never fun.

In the beginning it was pretty cool to roll around a city, taking down enemies, before speeding off to your next objective but this soon becomes a chore as the levels are poorly designed and the missions get really repetetive. Occassionally you’ll get a chance to do something different, an escort mission to cleanse the pallette? I don’t think that works somehow. Not only are the missions repetetive, they’re buggy too. This was a particular problem in escort missions. Often the thing you were escorting would just stop dead and not move, a bit like a small child before a tantrum. Believe me, it was me that was close to tears after playing the same god-awful level five times in a row.

The lack of presentation was a real surprise to me. I expected there to be at least some pretty CG cutscenes to look at with some nice cinematic camera angles. Nope, none of that is here. The closest you get is a little bit of a chat between Optimus/Megatron and his cronies followed  by a brief description of what to do and a blueprint flyover of a map. None of this ever really shows you what the hell is going on and there never seems to be any real weight to what’s happening. There isn’t even much of an ending video, the game just sort of ends. You get another shot of a stupid blueprint and then roll credits.

Seeing as this is a game based on one of the most popular lisences in the world, you’d have thought that the game would have something in the way of cinematics. I would’ve easily taken scenes from the movie over what’s there. At least, I might have gotten a bit more sense of what exactly was going on in relation to the movie. Shia LeBouf and Megan Fox have both leant voice talent to the game, but I thought that their story was one that didn’t really need to be told here and their inclusion needless. It just seemed like something that could be used to sell the game rather than add anything to it.

The game’s one redeeming factor, something that has saved this game from being one of the worst reviewed games on the site, is it’s mutliplayer. The game’s multiplayer is quite fun. It’s not amazing by any means, but if you want to do battle with your friends using giant robots it’s pretty cool. It’s certainly more fun to fight against user controlled robots than it is to fight against the AI.

All the usual modes are here: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and a vaiant of Capture The Flag that sees you collecting all the shards of the All Spark to win. There’s a number of other modes that aren’t all that special, but they’re definitely an improvement over the campaign.

Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen seemed like the Transformers game that everyone wanted to play. On a basic level it works, but for those wanting to do more than shoot the same enemies in repetetive missions over and over again I think you might have to look elsewhere to get your robo-fix.

6/10

Secondary Comments – Chris Malley

I have a confession to make. This game beat me. It’s not that it was hard (I think I died maybe 4 times), it just got to a point when I thought “screw it”. I couldn’t take the constant repetetiveness and the seeminly unavoidable bugs. Maybe it was just me, but this game just seemed to fail on every level. The story was close to nonexistant, the presentation was poor and the controls were some of the worst i’ve seen this year. The multiplayer is pretty fun, but it’s certainly not worth buying the game for. Not one I recommend.

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