Transformers: Autobots

"Yet another terrible movie based title"

Well, The Transformers movie is here and guess what that means? A terrible rushed and totally unoriginal game for you to play! Even worse, they tried to go Pokemon by making two versions of the game, that have the same mechanics and areas, just different characters and missions, grrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeaaaaat. If that bit of sarcasm didn't at least make you think before buying this blatant movie cash-in, the rest of my review should.

Story 3/10
Terrible, truly terrible. This so called "story" focuses on a all new plot that replaces the plot of the movie. You play as a new autobot that you can name and interact with Optimus Prime and other Autobots. Mostly the story is carried through cheesy dialog and long, drawn out and unskipable cut scenes. Bad.


Graphics 5/10
Now THIS hurts. The graphics are disgusting to look at. You can almost see every pixel on the sprites. The Color is drab and about 50% of everything is a palete swap. There are four environments but each of them are boring and have little veriaty in their designs. The Models for Optimus Prime and the other Transformer from the movie are done ok, but they really could of been better. Your character and the random grunts that you commonly face however, are terrible. You can barely make out the models and most of the grunts are indistinguishable from each other.

Gameplay 1/10
Now THIS is the real killer of your enjoyment. The game play is just nauseating. The controls work ok, but having to whip out your stylus to transform is really annoying, especially when it could of just been assigned to a face button. Basically, the developers have tried to fool you by telling you it is an open world game. This is a complete and total LIE. Yes you can move around in massive environments, however, there is seldom anything in these environments to actually do. The game possesses "sidemissions" but these missions are usually just boring and tedious challenges that are nothing special. The missions as well are, just boring. One of your early missions is to scan three radio towers , funnnnnnnn. Then when the missions look fun, they throw something stupid at you to kill it. For instance, in one mission, Jazz must sneak by a series of road blocks in less than 2 minutes. If you so much as hit another car, you have to restart the mission completely. It is things like these that make what would be a short game into a multi hour bore fest. You can "level up" by killing enemies. Sounds cool right? Wrong. When you level up you will be "rewarded" with a new move, these moves are lame and bore inducing moves that you should of had from the start. You have to earn the ability to climb walls, Jump Kick, and fire laser beams? Stupid. The only and I mean only sense of verity this game has is the fact that you can scan vehicles to earn more forms for the main character. However this fun wears off quick because most of the vehicles are just palliate swaps of each other. The game is also short, if it wasn't for its frequent glitches and freakishly difficult missions this game would be able to be completed in 3 hours. What is even worse, they have managed to ruin the fun of playing as Optimus Prime. How is this possible you might ask? Well lets just say the fact that he is about half as strong as he should be and the fact that he is really slow doesn't help his case much.

Sound 5/10
The Sound, like the rest of the game, is bad. The background music is terrible. However, the voice overs are pretty good, however, they DO get old when you have to reply the missions over and over.

Reply value 2/10
There is no reason to reply this game, other than to cause mass destruction with Optimus Prime.

Overall 4/10
I am so disappointed, they really could of done something good here but instead make a crappy movie game that does not do justice to the source material.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/07

Game Release: Transformers: Autobots (US, 06/19/07)