Reviewed on Xbox 360, also available PS3
I’ll be honest. I have no idea what this game is actually about. It happens on Earth, I got that, and… something about something, or maybe something else about something else. It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention, mind you, but rather that whoever was responsible for putting together a plot must’ve transformed into a desk or something early in the game’s development, and nobody noticed. I mean, desks are pretty unremarkable – which is a totally hilarious coincidence, because that’s exactly what this game is too.
According to Wikipedia’s synopsis then, the game is set sometime after the events of the film, Revenge of the Fallen, and just before the events of the next one. Humanity is now convinced the Decepticons have abandoned the planet, but Optimus Prime is convinced otherwise – an extraordinary feat of petrol-powered telepathy, perhaps, until you notice that there are Decepticons all over the place. Since they’re, like, 30-foot tall robots, they’re kind of hard to miss, but maybe the USMC’s radar array is out of order.
Whatever, that’s probably irrelevant. Just get out there and blow stuff up with rockets. For about four hours, anyway.
Yes, Transformers: Dark of the Moon is about four hours long.
And quite a lot of that time is spent walking / driving / flying down mostly empty corridors. During the bit where you play as Soundwave’s bionic bird Laserbeak (SORRY, SPOILERS), you also get to pretend you’re a box. Maybe this whole “transforming” business is really an enormously subtle metaphor for the human condition, but probably not.
Sure, being able to turn into a car at the press of a button is kind of rad, and it’s hard to fault the gameplay mechanics (as it were), but there’s simply no making up for the drab, even apathetic level design. While it’s true that most first- and third-person shooters really are just a series of murder rooms, it shouldn’t be this obvious.
There’s also multiplayer, but it’s a rubbishy My First Shooter-class multiplayer that you’ll hate yourself for playing.
It’s a tremendous shame, really, as High Moon’s last project, Transformers: War for Cybertron was a rather good game, and this one could have been so, so much better. Instead, it’s just another vapid, instantly forgettable sequel that seems to have missed the point of what made the first game fun. They also nixed the campaign co-op, which is positively criminal, as well as the option to replay chapters as other characters, because apparently removing features while adding none is a very clever idea. Wait no, it’s not.
Discuss Transformers Dark of the Moon in the forums
Loading ...
