Transformers The Game

Platform: Xbox 360 (and every other viable console).
Verdict: Lacking far more than an All Spark.
Rating: 2/5
With the shiver of a youth long lost and the memory of the excellent 2005 game to go by, there was a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe this would be a film-to-game title that would live up to the hype. Funny thing optimism, it makes disappointment so much harder to take – the game of the movie of the cartoon of the toy is an on-screen haemorrhage and a fine example of the industry at its lowest.
Allowing you to play through the film’s story from the perspectives of both the Autobots and Decepticons, Transformers The Game is a generic button-bashing crawl to protect or destroy the world, one stilted attack at a time. Employing the basic structure of ‘go here’ and ‘destroy that’, Transformers has you battling countless dumb drones and haphazardly travelling between locales in transformable vehicle form.
Featuring some beautifully rendered robots the game is a joy to look at in stills but the crippling frame rate, glitchy action and shameful pop-up mean it’s far from what it aims to be while vehicle handling is atrociously twitchy and sound bites repeat ad infinitum, driving home the message that this game was far from ready to be released. Such is the curse of the film adaptation – it has to be released in sync with the film, regardless of finished state.
Interspersing the levels with updating mission objectives, Transformers attempts to thinly disguise the void of depth that is all too apparent but the poorly allocated time limits and lack of decent checkpoints means you’ll often end up repeating the same repetitive section over again.
Playing more like a graphically updated Godzilla or King of the Monsters game, the excellent Transformers licence and re-imagined mech design is wasted on a shallow, poorly made title that foolishly ignores all the great work Melbourne House did in crafting the only decent Transformers game two years ago.
To this day I still regret giving away my Transformers collection but I’ll never regret getting rid of this.