Less than meets the eye...
TheDave
from Leighton Buzzard
, 03/12/2007
This is the forth or fifth Tranformers game to be released in the last 20-odd years, and I've seen most of them.
Back in the day (about 1984) the first Transformers game I remember was for the commodore 64. It was a variant on Space Invaders, where up to 3 players shot things coming down the screen at you. Nowadays you can get more technologically advanced fridges, but at the time, considering the technology around, it featured some jaw-dropping visuals. Unfortunately, it was rubbish to play and has long since been forgotten.
The most recent Transformers game other than this one was only released about 4 years ago. It was by Atari and was a 3D adventur-y game with some nice touches and with some jaw-dropping visuals. It was OK to play, if a bit repetitive, and was just big enough to finish with about 10-12 hours playing. Once you'd played it, though, that was it - no need to play it all over again. It seems that people have already forgotten it.
So here comes the obligitory Movie Tie-In Transformers game. I had high hopes for this, since the film was actually a lot of fun. Apart from looking A-MAZING, the story was no frllls family summer fun, with the most important thing you could expect of a summer blockbuster - lots of giant robots hitting each other!
As such, my demands of this game were not high, but VERY specific: look pretty and have plenty of robo-related violence. Considering the high standard of previous games, not to mention the film, you'd expect it to have some jaw-dropping visuals. Yes?
Actually, no. The graphics on this game are nothing short of appaling. The backgrounds are rendered reasonably enough, but all the characters are very poorly filled. You can tell where they are a mile off, since anything not static quite frankly looks like a slow moving potato. Not exactly robo-riffic.
'Fair enough, the graphics are poor' you might think 'but what about the gameplay?'. To which I say 'what gameplay?'. The game is so very poorly thought out that it feels more like a load of random levels lashed together. They all seem to rely on going from one place (let's call it 'point A') to another place (how about 'point B') and sometimes back again, blowing things up as you go along. And it makes no sense at all that one minute you play an Autobot character (YAY!) and the next you'll be a Decepticon (BOOOOO).
Worse still, the controls are so stupidly fiddly, half the time I forgot what button did what. The combat mechanics are so basic, they largely rely on you pushing a button to destroy your foe - there is no skill or finesse, it's virtually automatic. I half heartedly played it for a couple of hours, got through about 7 levels (each time thinking 'is that it?!!?') and gave in bored.
The only one good feature of the game is that the 'transforming noise' is in there. That's about it. To be honest, you could spend a welcome 20 minutes finding the 'Transformer noise' on google, download it, and play it back about 50 times and you'd have more fun and saved a lot of time. It was so un-engaging, I actually started LOOKING FORWARD to 'Songs of Praise' coming on telly (that'll teach me to play games on a Sunday). I honestly believe I could have finished the whole thing before the teatime news came on.
So, considering the 25 years of the Transformers legacy, and the technology availible(with today's technology and games systems) this was a perfect oppertunity to finally deliver a memorable, playable, visually satisfying Transformers game to put them on the gameplayers map. Unfortunately, this misses out on every level and is actually one of the worst games I have played on the PSP. I find myself actually TRYING to forget the experience as I type this.
Still, they are making a sequal to the film... there's always hope that SOMEDAY they'll get it right! I only hope it's in my lifetime though, since unlike a robot, I doubt I will live forever.
1 out of 1 person found this review helpful
Read all reviews
