A 300-minute simulation of life in a garbage disposal
Loosely (and when I say "loosely, I mean REALLY loosely) following the plot of the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen movie which came out about two weeks ago, the game is a third-person shooter where you can play as either the Autobots or Decepticons in two separate campaigns. Since most people reading this review have probably already seen the movie, I'll just go ahead and say that you can't actually play as the Fallen and you have to face him in BOTH campaigns. Yeah, that means you fight him as Megatron. How stupid is that? And Sam and Mikeala are barely even seen throughout the entire game. I'll talk more about the story aspect of the game later, but let's move on to gameplay.
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen gives you the option to transform between either your robot or vehicle form. The first sign that something's wrong is when you learn the game's controls in the tutorial that seems like it takes 5 hours instead of 5 minutes. Instead of tapping a button such as Y to switch between your two forms, you're required to hold down the right trigger, which is the same button you fire with and what you hold down to accelerate. Now how can you disagree that that isn't screwed up to some degree? While in vehicle mode, you have to keep holding down RT. In order to slow down, you'll have to let your finger off the button a little. The thing is, you can't not accelerate while in vehicle form. In other words, you can't come to a complete stop and still be in your vehicle form. Also, the X button fires off missiles while in vehicle form, which also happens to be the melee button while in robot form. Don't you see what I'm trying to get at here? Too many of the same buttons have two or more actions. An example is when you're driving around at top speed and you crash into a building. You'll have to transform into robot form, move back into the street, and then transform back. And that'll happen to you a lot.
There are a few moves to pull off during transformations. If you hold down RT and A, then release RT, you'll jump in the air while transforming. If you hold the X button down instead, you'll perform a ground stomp. To this I ask this question: Why couldn't you just press the jump button and then press X to do this? You can't actually do any of these unless you're coming out of a transformation. While these things aren't quite game-breaking, they sure make things a whole lot more complicated, which in turn, makes them worse. One thing I noticed in the first game was that using guns was useless since most of your enemies had impenetrable shields. Thankfully, they got rid of this, but now quite the opposite is to be found in this game. When you perform melee attacks, they're practically useless since if you start hitting someone, they'll transform and drive away, which means your guns and blasters are pretty much required to kill them, and this is the complete opposite of the first game. In fact, this whole game seems to be what the first wasn't, probably because it got bad reviews and they wanted to try something different. Unfortunately it hasn't worked out too well so far, and it certainly didn't fare well in the AI section.
The enemy AI will do some pretty stupid things. If there's a building nearby, ninety percent of the time the enemy will attempt to climb it. This isn't too bad except it can't attack or defend while climbing, meaning you can just take easy shots at its back and he'll essentially be finished long before he had a chance to get to the roof. And while I was playing, the AI never under any circumstances dislodged from the building to protect itself. The only time it gets a bit annoying is when it somehow makes it to the top and starts firing missiles at you. This forces you to climb either the building it's on or another building and start shooting at it, because you're unable to do so while on ground level. Most of the time it'll turn into a helicopter and fly above you, making it extremely hard to hit. This makes me wonder why they didn't add in a lock-on targeting system. Sounds fun, doesn't it?
Each Transformer has different abilities such as healing or setting up a mini-gun, but most of the time I hardly used them. Unfortunately, for every good thing the game does (mainly just letting you play as the Transformers and blow stuff up is about the only good thing the campaign does), five flaws take its place. The missions themselves are really repetitive. A majority of them have you go over to some area on the map and kill everything on screen. This may be fun for twenty minutes, but when you're forced to do it for about 5-6 hours (2.5-3 hours for each campaign), I don't think it'll be quite as appealing as the first time around. Sometimes you'll pick up people and escort them to extraction points, guard the building they're in, destroy the building they're in, or escort some military vehicles around. People who just like to randomly blow some stuff up for six hours and don't get bored of it, unlike myself, might find this acceptable to some degree, but most people should want more out of a game than just that.
Another problem I have with the game is its story, or in other words, its utter lack thereof. Besides the intro movie, you'll never see any real cutscenes in the game that give you an idea of what your mission will be about. After each mission, you go back to either side's hangout area (A military hanger for the Autobots and a room on Cybertron for the Decepticons) and talk about your performance during the mission. Oh yeah, the missions are timed, and you get stars based on how fast you complete them. So if you don't get enough stars in a mission, you may not be able to play the next one, which then forces you to replay missions and attempt to earn more stars. And since the time doesn't stop while someone is explaining something to you while there's no objective on your radar, you'll have to memorize locations, and that's a real blast to do. Anyway, there isn't even an ending cinematic cutscene. I'm sure this game will sell a lot of copies despite what I or anyone other than the critics say about it, (even if I give it a 1/10, which I have to say isn't an inadequate score for the game, and I wouldn't blame the person should anyone write a review with that score) so why can't they make a decent effort to put in some cutscenes?
The only other aspect of the game other than its very concept that isn't bad is the multiplayer, and that's not saying much. It definitely isn't anything great, but it's several times better than the campaigns. There's Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, as well as Capture the Flag where you have to recover all five pieces of the All-Spark. Unfortunately, during the 10 or so multiplayer matches I had time to play, most of the players I encountered drove away from me so I had to race after him, making it seem less like I'm playing a Transformers game and more like playing Nascar on barren streets instead of on an actual race track. Ever other encounter I had besides that description was firing blasters at each other while moving around, similar to Saints Row 2. With that said, multiplayer was where I had the most fun with this game.
From a visual standpoint, the game doesn't look that great. I encountered a lot of glitches when escorting military jeeps, since they often lagged behind and then suddenly reappeared with the rest of the group. Occasionally even mission objectives didn't appear on the radar, forcing me to restart from the beginning of the mission. Most of the buildings look OK, but they aren't destructible, so when you think about entering what's called "Free Roam" in the campaigns, don't expect anything fun to do. The Transformers actually looked better in the first game than here. Plus when you get hit by a small robot, the transition animations look horrible. The audio doesn't fare too much better. The voice acting for Optimus Prime is pretty good, but Megatron's voice is too light and sounds like an old man. Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox lend their voices, and they do a good job when they're in the game, which isn't extremely often. The soundtrack is OK and all the other Transformers' voices sound pretty terrible.
I wouldn't recommend anyone to play Transformers, and had it not been for its multiplayer, I would've easily given this game a 1/10. My advice if you're going to get it is to skip the campaign modes and head straight for the multiplayer portion of the game, because all you'll find in the campaigns is a 300-minute simulation of life in a garbage disposal. If you know what's good for you, try to avoid this game altogether and just see the movie.