As a general rule the gaming fraternity doesn’t take kindly too to movies that are turned into games, especially when they’ve only been created to fuel the marketing machine that is today’s film industry.
Despite this, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a pleasant surprise. Although it had its faults there is a lot to be said for being able to morph from robot to car and vice versa with the click of a button.
Unfortunately, in keeping with the vast majority of movie-to-game titles, it just wasn’t very well thought out.
Concept and Story
As concepts go Transformers is pretty epic. In revenge of the fallen players have the opportunity to choose between Autobot and Decepticon campaigns, fighting the relevant enemies and overcoming the obvious hurdles that would face an alien race of mechanical giants on a daily basis.
The story sticks pretty close to the general plot of the movie, although we did notice a few deviations here and there. It seems as though Activision were handed an original script when the movie started filming and, as the film’s director changed a few things here and there, the developers went on merrily writing code without being kept in the loop.
Just to make things more interesting the game includes the addition of a few characters which allows both factions to ride on a pretty even keel throughout the story (there is a jet based Autobot included to match the Decepticon Starscream). The Cut scenes do a reasonable job of keeping the player on track although they are plagued by a small, yet repetitive number of stock catch phrases.
Each campaign lasts about four hours, although this will seem much longer due to the unoriginal and repetitive enemies that come for you wave after wave, which brings us to our next point…
Gameplay
Although it’s fun to drive/fly around shooting enemies while changing from robot to vehicle modes it does get repetitive. With the exception of the boss characters which are sparsely littered across the gaming landscape, Transformers will find you battling any one of three or four stock standard enemies that refuse to change or adapt to gameplay.
In short, the AI in Transformers is terrible and as a result the gameplay can get incredibly boring quickly.
Each mission is a linear, directional affair in which players are ushers from check point to check point without a very clear rhyme or reason. Each checkpoint is highlighted by a cut scene, a factor which can become annoying when all you want to do is play.
Each Transformer has a mixture of basic and special weapons, vehicle weapons, melee attacks and advanced attacks attributed to it.
Something that can be said for Transformers is the enjoyment one can take out of putting together a particularly well placed vehicle ground pound and finishing it off with a special weapons headshot. In short the melee/weapons combinations can be challenging but fun to master.
Each mission will allocate a certain amount of life force or energy to you according to your accuracy, time spent completing mission and special awards. These points can be used to enhance your overall statistics such as health, advanced weapon damage and melee damage out of game.
In each level and across the campaign as a whole players can also unlock an original transformers episode and other Transformers for each level by completing side missions, this ads an unexpected yet welcome element of longevity to the game.
Visuals and Sound
The visuals and sound were average. Although the vehicle physics are great, the cut scenes and nitty gritty of the action were less than exciting. This coupled with a few graphical glitches (While flying during a sea level the Autobot simply hovered above the water, despite our best efforts to crash him) left us feeling a bit disappointed.
It has to be said however that if Activision had spent nearly as much time or money on the in game graphics as the film makers did on the actual movie it would have been truly phenomenal.
The sound was middle of the road, neither disappointing nor impressive apart from the cringe worthy one-liners supplied on repeat and ad nauseum by the game’s characters. “Let’s bust some decepti-chumps!” being just one example.
Conclusion
On the whole Transformers: Revenge of the fallen was fun, for a while, after that it became annoying and repetitive. Despite this, as movie-to-game ports go it’s not a bad effort at all.
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