Written by Jeff Buckland, 7/18/2007
Played on:
PS3
It's been a long time since I saw my last Transformers cartoon, and the original animated movie is a distant memory, but the resurgence of this sci-fi toy phenomenon has gone better than many had hoped. The movie has been very successful in theaters and is already spawning a franchise along with tons of new, slick toys in stores. The game adaptation, sadly, is probably the worst part of all the new Transformers merchandising. Published by Activision and developed on the PS3 by Traveller's Tales, Transformers: The Game simply doesn't live up to the hype - especially if you've already seen the movie.
The game does follow the movie's plot loosely, but you'll find that the missions you need to do are generally less exciting than in the movie due to the rather dull action sequences. From playing as the Autobot Bumblebee whose mission is to protect Mikaela and Sam (and his great-grandfather's glasses that have the encoded location of the "Allspark" on them) to just plain destroying half of a city as a Decepticon, the events in the game do follow the movie but are decidedly more disjointed and often have you doing things repeatedly just so that the overall length of the game is increased.
The models for the Transformers are very detailed, much like in the movie, but it's unfortunate that they transform so quickly from vehicle to robot form that you can't even really see what happens. At least in the movie they transform slowly the first few times so you can see the attention to detail that went into the CG, but here it's so fast it's hard to appreciate. And while the fighting is fluid in the movie, here it's very, well, video-gamey. Everyone has a standard 3-hit attack combo along with ranged attacks you can also toss out and most of the bots can also pick up stuff in the environment to throw. Most of this is guided through by a half-decent physics system, but it feels a lot like the Transformers themselves have no ragdoll physics, considering how some of them will fly backwards the same exact way every time after a big hit. It's impressive to see a Decepticon shake itself off and get back up after getting bashed into a building, but the fighting still doesn't look anywhere near as good as it does in the movie.
I had the most fun in this game when destroying buildings as a Decepticon, where the player is actually rewarded for doing so (unlike during the Autobot campaign). The largely destructible city has an appropriate amount of fires and explosions when you start smashing it up, which is one of the most satisfying things in Transformers. Yes, blowing up the environment is more fun than the story, most of the major missions, and pretty much all of the little side missions which are usually not worth doing at all. Even with the original movie actors for Sam, Mikaela, Optimus Prime and Megatron, they just didn't have much to work with. The game developers didn't seem to have access to any of the actual movie's script, so the cutscenes are all pre-rendered and include some pretty shoddy dialogue compared to the movie and disjointed action. The voice acting is great, but that only goes so far when they're working with a sub-par script written by what seems to be the game's developers instead of the movie's writers.
Transformers does have a few redeeming moments, like when you get to play as Scorponok, but there are just way too many long stretches of mediocrity for me to be able to recommend this one. The PS3 version looks great in screenshots, but it plays like a budget game and yet still sports the full $59.99 price tag. Head to your local department store and spend half as much on some of the toys - you'll have much more fun playing with the toys with a kid in your family than you would playing this game.
