Directional Pad

Reviews » Transformers: The Game [PC]

Even if you were too young, too old, or just not cool enough to have been into the 80's toy phenomenon that is Transformers before, it's pretty much impossible at this point to have not been thrashed by the current advertising blitz surrounding the new movie from Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay. As it turns out, it's a damn good movie. Huge robots tear ass around the city, smacking each other around and blowing shit up. Plus Megan Fox is hot as hell. Backing it up are metric tons of new toys, merchandise, and a cross-platform game from Activision and Traveller's Tales. Identically styled and concurrently developed for PS2, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, the game picks up some bonus levels on PC and 360 "cybertron edition". Priced from 29.99 (PC) all the way to 69.99 (360 CE), the only differences are those levels and degree of prettiness. My review will cover the PC version but gameplay concerns apply to all of these.

Traveller's Tales has a spotty record, at best. In existence since Sonic 3D Blast, they've had their name affixed to some good games, some not so good games, and plenty of licensed throwaway crap. More recently they gained some well earned fame with their whimsical treatment of the Lego Star Wars franchise, managing to pump out the most entertaining Star Wars games since Jedi Outcast. Did they repeat the magic here with everybody's favorite 30 foot tall sentient robotic war machines?

Yes and No. There are some things about this game that absolutely shine, and others that are so half baked you just know that they ended up really strapped for time. One wonders what TT could have done with another six months to develop. The game is designed as a level-based sandbox-type game, sort of a baby GTA. There are two campaigns to play, heroic Autobot and malevolent Decepticon. Once you start, each level deposits you in a self-contained overworld area. From here you are immediately (and repeatedly) squawked at over communicator about the next pressing mission, but you by no means have to go to it right away.

Initially, the sense of euphoria in controlling a transformer in all his glory in an open-world atmosphere is pretty overwhelming. Immediately you start blasting away with your weapons (light and heavy, each robot has unique attacks), breaking shit with your fists in a standard taptaptap melee combo, and picking up loose items in the environment to chuck across the landscape with extremely satisfying distance. Then you figure out you can scale buildings, holy crap! It's on, leaping from rooftop to rooftop (leaving impact crater decals on ground textures as you pass, nice touch), diving off the highest roof and transforming in mid-air... wait. You can't transform in mid-air? It's kind of a downer but it doesn't hamper gameplay much, except for possible "yeehaw look at this" moments when you're free-roaming. The environments are highly destructible, with secondary objects breaking into pieces, and every building exploding in a cloud of smoke, fire and broken glass as you pass- yeah, seriously, you're a giant robot, there ain't no pussyfootin' around- but the basic frame of the building stays intact. Damage remains as long as you're in level, but if you start a mission or reload it will reset.

All playable characters besides Scorponok (who gets a straight-outta-Dune sand tunneling ability instead) can transform at any time. The Autobots all handle differently, but generally the feel is really too artificial to ever be very comfortable in vehicle form. It's never clear whether the regular brake or the handbrake will leave you better speed through a turn, and some characters have absolutely abysmal handling anyway. When Bumblebee gets his '08 concept Camaro upgrade, the level he's in has such slick surfacing, it's all you can do to keep him from smoking his tires into oblivion rather than actually going where you need to be. Here the Decepticons have the edge- not only is Barricade the easiest car-mode to drive, but Starscream and Blackout are airborne in alt-mode, and are entirely different animals. Blackout is never a problem as he can hover and strafe however he pleases, and Starscream is surprisingly easy to handle for a mach 2+ superiority fighter. I wish more attention had been paid to the handling of the Autobots, but it's still convenient fast travel, and the feeling of freedom and power it provides is right on the money. Transform, and roll out.

All this freeroam stuff is without a doubt the most fun of the game. In the Autobot campaign you start as good ol' Bumblebee, in '74 Camaro form. In later levels you are assigned teammates Ironhide and Jazz as the mission demands. Soon after that you unlock the main man himself, Optimus Prime. All of the aforementioned sandbox shenanigans become at least 200% cooler as you realize you are 200% stronger, more agile, more armed, and goddammit, cooler looking than your comrades. It's a hoot. The Decepticon campaign begins in a totally different way, as you are immediately assigned Blackout as a playable character. A hulking juggernaut that transforms into a Sikorsky MH-53 Pave Low (that's a monstrous, 90-foot heavy lift special operations helicopter that's even more badass than it sounds). Blackout is, for lack of a better term, an unstoppable engine of destruction. From then on the action waxes and wanes as you are assigned weaker, but still fun and unique Decepticons (Scorponok and Barricade), to Blackout's destructive peer Starscream, and finally Megatron himself.

When you're tear-assing around the city in robot mode, the denizens get understandably upset. If you play it cool, retreating to a hidden area when the fuzz arrives, and travel mostly in vehicle mode, you can avoid an unwanted gangbang from the earth authorities. Problem being, you're a three-story robot loaded to the mouthplate with artillery, that breaks stuff just by bumping into it. at some point during every level, you're going to achieve a level 5 Destruction rating (bad for Autobots, actually a rewarded Feat for Decepticons). At that point you are relentlessly pursued by the full might of Earth's forces, which usually amounts to a buttload of cops, tanks, fast attack vehicles, and helicopters that chip away at your health in a way that, while not imminently deadly, is really annoying. And the computer remembers, too. you can't just reload the level and be rid of them, they'll converge on you again in short order. The exception I found to this obnoxiousness was with Blackout and Starscream. Both spend most of their time on military base levels where they are constantly hounded by Pave Lows and Ospreys. It's not uncommon to be going about some actual task on the ground, then look up to see you're surrounded by 6 or more enemy aircraft all pecking away at you. Luckily both of these 'bots possess hilariously effective weapons that down the aircraft in one blow. I found myself just clomping around these levels, spoiling for a fight. It's good to be bad.

Other than simply breaking things, there are a few other freeroam interests. There is a lot to break, for sure, but that in and of itself wouldn't be entertaining for too long. Enemy drones are placed around the city to give you some worthy adversaries. There are 100 energon cubes and 5 faction symbols per level to collect, along with 3 to 6 Feats, depending on character, to accomplish. In each level there are also 5 challenge missions, in the vein of destroying a set number of drones under certain criteria, or timed item/checkpoint collecting. All of these unlock extras, most of which are lame, pixelated movie stills and comic scans. There are a few notable ones however, like alternate oldschool-style paintjobs for Optimus, Starscream, and Jazz, and two SUPER SECRET character models.

If that sounds like a lot, it... well, it isn't. The freeroam aspect is almost intoxicatingly cool at first, but you come to find that after the (really boring) item collection, and maddening challenge missions, there isn't much else to do. Granted, behind the wheel, er, stick, um, brain... whatever of Starscream or Blackout, destroying stuff is its own reward, but when you're stuck in a city level as one of the non-WMD robots, the stuff gets old. Of course, there's always the story missions, right?

Yeah. Yeah, they're there, alright. But most of them are just dumb. TT seems to be real hot on timers. Nearly every mission is on a clock at some point or another, and while some are fun due to the frantic pace, others are just a tremendous pain in the ass. The basic flow for missions can be expressed thusly:

Mission = [TIMED RUSH TO AREA] -> [DEFEAT [x] DRONES] -> [TIMED RUSH TO AREA] -> [DEFEAT [x] DRONES] -> [TIMED RUSH TO AREA] -> [DEFEAT [x] DRONES]

The missions are rarely inventive, and most have you pinned to a certain radius dubbed the ACTION ZONE. Somehow the ACTION ZONE is always a little too small for your needs, and if you step outside the boundaries of it, a very short timer appears and you are told to return immediately. Not a big deal, you might think, but considering the utterly ludicrous knockback dialed into the physics of the game, sometimes you can lose a mission over it. I can't really describe how overdone the knockback really is, you just have to experience it for the full effect. Certain explosions, ground attacks, and even a few melee attacks can send your character (who, keep in mind, is an alien robot weighing several tons) soaring through the air over the equivalent of a few hundred feet. Every time. Can't block it, can't avoid it. It's one of the more obnoxious aspects of a schizophrenic fighting system.

That fighting system is a hodgepodge of terrible ideas and great ones, that ends up being fun once you finally learn all its quirks. That doesn't mean you won't be enraged to the point of breaking things along the way. The game operates with an independently aimable camera view, so you can target and lock on to whatever you wish, and move in a different direction. The camera will be drawn to enemies, from which point you can hard lock it with a button, and then keep a bead on them wherever they may fly (knockback effects them too!). The melee attack is a standard combo job that locks in after only a couple of taps. On one hand this makes sure you can fit in a lot of damage into a small window, on the other, combined with the camera system, you may end up attacking the opposite direction you need and deliver your long combo string to a wall whilst enemies wail on you from the back.

Ranged weapons come in "heavy" and "light" flavors. These names are misleading, because there's no guarantee which is the more damaging between characters. In general your heavy weapon is slow, while the light one is more rapid fire. Every character's is different and while Blackout's EMP mines will wipe the floor with anything they connect with, the analogous attack from Megatron is comparatively useless against anything but the side of a building. It's bizarre. What's really dumb is that after the third level of enemy drone, your ranged weapons are USELESS against enemies if they're in robot mode. They have an energy shield that will protect them from anything but a super-ridiculous knockback event, and only some characters can deliver those at will. That same shield will protect against all but a precious few melee attacks. You have a shield like this as well, but not the nigh-precognitive efficiency to deploy it like the CPU can.

Then there's throwing stuff. You can chuck anything you can pick up, really far, in the direction you're looking. Make that really, really, really far if you're playing as Prime. Some items, like light poles and signs, and notably, a giant swordfish yanked off a restaurant, can be wielded as melee weapons as well. While locked on, you can toss objects with great accuracy, making them potent projectiles. You can even throw down-but-not-out enemies at other enemies. The problem is that the battle system places far too much reliance on throwing crap. After the third-tier enemy drone, the ONLY WAY to shake an enemy from its standard unstoppable-radius-of-death attack, or impenetrable-bubble-of-defense, is to throw something at it. Then run up and hit it. Then get out of the way, because the pattern is going to repeat. One way only, to kill each drone is a terrible chore, and when you get ganged up on by the tow-truck drone that whirls its tow hook around itself, sending every tree, pole, sign, and car in range streaking across the landscape (KNOCKBACK EFFECT!!!), along with the one that charges wildly and unstoppably in your general direction (K.E., again), you can settle down for a long, stupid, painful battle.

Luckily, there are fun mission levels, and they're called boss fights. Most of them, understandably, are lumped towards the final level of the campaign. The actual non-drone Transformers are more creative in their attacks, generally, and you can mix up how you deliver the pain. Perhaps the best battle falls to Jazz; he gets to take out TWO Decepticon badasses in one level. AT ONCE. Why wasn't he this cool in the movie? The final boss fights are a little lacking, and I'm not going to spoil anything by talking about them in-depth, but suffice it to say that they could have done better than recycling drone attacks for the big, bad end bosses.

Technically speaking, the game looks great. 360 and PS3 versions will get snazzier textures and whiz-bang assets like fancy shadows and bloom, which, amazingly, isn't overdone in this application. PS2 owners will have to suffer through with muddy textures and such. I was afraid this would be the case for me, playing the PC version on my terribly outdated machine. How outdated you ask? Well, let's just say the mere mention of DX9 makes my video card shit itself. Miraculously, the game looks pretty damn good. The game scales most things automatically, but I was able to choose to implement bloom, motion blur, and shadows. Bloom, as I mentioned, is not overdone here and without it, the game is actually too dark in a lot of places. This could be fixed with an in-game brightness adjustment but they didn't include that, for whatever reason. Automatically scaled, my textures were fairly lo-res, but the game ran great and only slowed down enough to affect things when I was simultaneously trashing 5 helicopters at once with splash-damage weapons. Pretty admirable for my ol' P4 machine. Most of the attention went into the robot models, as it should have. You can tell that the modelers put a lot of love into these characters. They are beautiful just standing there, very movie-accurate, but they are even better in motion. The animators held nothing back. From the nonchalant way Bumblebee kicks away a pesky police car, to the way Prime winds up as he throws an object, and the stunning rotor-blade melee attack from Blackout, you'll never be unimpressed by the way these things move.

Controller support deserves a special mention on this game, because my PS2 controller adapter was immediately recognized without a fuss, and I was easily able to map everything just the way I wanted. It automatically binds opposite axes, has adjustable speed for control and camera analog, and Robot, Car, Flight and Menu binds are all independently adjustable. You can actually set which keys you want to act as confirm and cancel on your pad, eliminating having to reach over to the keyboard. A nice touch I wish we could see more often.

I really am at a loss at what to rate this game. I had a lot of fun with it. It also pissed me off a bunch, and not in the satisfying Contra kind of way. I think what you will take from this game depends very much on two factors:

1) Do you like Transformers? A lot?

and

2) How much are you gonna be spending on this?

If the answer to 1) is no, or not much, take a pass. A lot of the charm and enjoyment I took from this game comes from being an immense Transformer nerd, and I realize not everyone is the same way. If you don't have a love for the source material, there's mostly just annoyance waiting for you in playing the game. If you are a fan, then proceed to 2)- I'll be straight with you, there is no way in hell I'd be the least bit happy about blowing 60 or 70 bucks on this game. Current-gen games are already pushing it in terms of value, even for really good games. So for ho-hum ones, forget about it. PS2 owners get to spend 40 bucks instead, but for an uglified version. PC gamers, however, can score a full-featured version of the game for $30 msrp, and it can be had for 20. At 20 bucks, for the Transformer fan, I can recommend this game. As for everyone else, skip the purchase.

I'm going to score this game Not Recommended, mostly cause of the fanboy-appeal modifier. If we had a neutral score, I'd give it that instead. This is a game that has a lot of good work put into it, some real love and skill were applied here and it shows in some areas, which makes it that much sadder that it isn't seen elsewhere. I would encourage renting the game, there is certainly some fun to be had here, but unless you're a TransFan who found a great deal, save your money. Decent try, Traveller's Tales. Keep the basic plan, but tidy up the fighting, add more stuff to do, get creative with your missions, and you'll have a truly outstanding game ready for the sequel.

Transformers: The Movie - All Platforms

Presentation

One of the best qualities, the robots look amazing, with truly jaw-dropping animations. Scales well on PC, even on old DX8 graphics cards.

Gameplay

A really mixed bag. Best experienced as a Decepticon- flying and trashing human property is great fun. Trying not to is considerably less, and odd-feeling driving and formulaic missions make the campaign a bore.

Replayability

Low. While this very moment I'm considering going back to the Starscream level and tearing stuff up for a few minutes, I won't be wanting to play through it again any time soon.

Value

Ranges from horrible on 360 and PS3, to good enough to overlook some faults on PC.

Overall

A game that could have very easily been great given more development time. as it is, it's reduced to a good bargain bin find in a year or two. Some good fun for fans, not much for anybody else.