Transformers: The Game

"A fun movie game, but for novelty purposes only."

Transformers: The Movie was amazing. A whole ton of "in your face" action, an okay storyline, as well as a cheesy love interest. Everything that makes a movie great, eh? The game follows through with this, and more, but theres just the small details that polish off a game you really do need in order for it to become fully enjoyable.

Lets get down to it. The games story mode is biased directly off the movie. It's a GTA style roaming area, where you can walk/drive/fly around taking on diffrent missions (called chapters in the game) to advance in the story. The entire city is pretty much your plaything, as not much can hurt you aside another transformer. Buildings will crumble from your weapons and cars can me kicked across streets by simply running into them. It's quite fun to smash things.

The graphics actually are pretty good. There isn't a whole lot of super detail in every gear of your body, but they look fine to me. You can see the entire city pretty much at the right angle, and the cities or other areas are huge landscapes. This is why you'll need your transformed mode a lot of the time. In order to get from place to place in a short amount of time. The transformation sequence isn't annoying, as I thought it could be, it's quick and to the point. The few things that bugged me is, that when you transform to robot mode if your car gets flipped over, you'll transform back to the flipped state. But it isn't hard to unflip yourself. Also, the camera can get out of hand. You aim with the pointer, yet to melee attack you swing the remote side to side. If you leave the pointer at the site, the camera will start to turn. If you try fixing it with the camera reset button, it'll just keep going until you realize the pointer isn't centre. It's also a bit difficult to get used to doing that after locking onto an object as well. You can move the pointer, but it won't do anything until you unlock from the target.

The sound however, is what bugged me even more. The sound options only allow for change between Surround, Stereo and mono, as well as music. The thing is, the voice acting is really quiet. I had to turn up my TV by a lot in order to hear when anyone was talking. And then the sound effects just begin to bug anyone else. Why they couldn't throw in a voicing volume is beyond me. But there really isn't too much talking in the game anyway. And any ingame instructions are usually repeated if you don't get around to following them right away.

Now the bottom line is this. It's just fun. Fun to play for a a small while, to do a few missions, or collect the random collectibles spread across the world. But too much of this game will just get on your nerves, putting you off playing it for even longer. Definatly worth at least a rental, however.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/16/07