This game sure is Epic... an Epic TURD!
For starters, the game has some really awesomely detailed characters that you can play. They animate farely well, and transforming them is easily the most entertaining portion of the game. Tapping that Y button never gets old. Except for one you have to tap it twice because the game is so buggy that sometimes even hitting one button doesn't quite work.
Now if you are looking anywhere else other then at the robot you are controlling, keeping in mind the alt-modes somehow look like trash too, then you are probably looking at some of the worst graphics to ever grace the current-gen systems. Everything else is just ugly. Garbage textures, flat surfaces, crappy lighting, terrible explosion effects, and horrendously so-bad-they-could-have-been-in-GTAIII-on-the-PS2 ugly cars all round out the complete packge of crapitude. You would think that someone at Traveller's Tales would have made a decision to make sure this game looks terrific considering the source material. But sadly they were probably more concerned with how low they could keep the budget as to turn the best profit.
The game also manages to sound about as boring as it could possibly get. The alt-modes engines sound extremely annoying. You basically get one sound from them no matter how fast you are going. I suspect the clips for the audio were "borrowed" from websites that furnish audio sample files, because nothing in the game sounds even remotely realistic. Even the voice actors managed to phone in every single line.
The gameplay is sandboxish only in the sense that you are plopped into one level that you can go anywhere in right away, however there are indeed seperate levels. So when you move to another level, you can't get back to the previous area. Unless the next level you end up in happens to be the same level as the previous one, only at night with a different name! But still, it is a different level because all of the "side" quest items are moved around and you get to do the same mundane hunting again. Not that you would want to. There is virtually no reason to stay in any of the areas once you are done with the main quest stages. All you get for doing the side missions are unlocked "bonus content" packages that are basically just promo material for the movie. When the best looking part of your game is a behind the scenes shot of the movie set, you know you have problems.
Not only is the gameplay just bad in it's own right, but it's easily the buggiest I have played in a long time. I recently barfed up a review for the Superman Xbox 360 game, and in all honesty that game wasn't nearly as buggy as this one.
Bugs in this game range from minor, to downright gameplay-interrupting, controller-throwing absurd. Evidentally the developers just don't have the cost of game testers in their budget. Or they had one and he was too busy checking out all the photos from the movie to bother doing his job.
The single stupidest decision made with the game is the fact that each and every robot has two choices of weapons to fire, heavy and light guns, yet virtually NONE of your enemies are effected by them. There are a few extremely lowbie drones that are effected, but that's about it. Every single boss I fought was able to just put up a magic shield and be completely immune to every kind of fire I tossed at them. Yet each and every one of these bosses was able to take a lot of damage just from having crap thrown at them. Now, not necessarily the first piece of crap you throw at them, no. The first thing you throw makes it "possible" for maybe the second or third piece of crap thrown at them to do a bunch of damage. Meaning, every single boss fight is all about throwing crap at them. Now this wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the two mechanics required to do this successfully weren't totally broken.
Picking up crap is done by hitting the B button when standing near whatever it is you want to pick up, but only sometimes. More often then not your character does the animation of trying to pick it up, only to come up empty handed, or even better yet you bump the item just a smidge and send it moving away. Have you ever seen those old slap-stick comedy shows where some idiot is trying to pick up a can only to kick it away as they bend down, then going after it to just repeat kicking it away and chasing it around? That's the Transformers game in a nutshell.
Not only is it darn near impossible to actually pick anything up, but once you have it picked up it takes forever to get the retarded targetting system to actually target your enemy. Even when your targetting reticle is right on top of your enemy and you click the button, no dice. It still doesn't lock on. The lock on success rate is a bit higher then the "pick up the damn car" success rate, but not by much.
The gameplay ends up boiling down to whether or not you were lucky enough to not only pick up an item within the first few tries, but where you lucky enough to turn around, get a lock, and then actually hit the enemy with the item you just chucked at it. Knowing what I know about statistics, and this game, the success rate of this actually happening is painfully low. This is why I gave the game a Difficulty rating of "Hard". Not hard in it's own right, but hard to put up with all the damn problem it has.
There are a few "challenge" missions on each level that are made available when you collect enough magic yellow boxes that are scattered around. Every level has the exact same 4 challenges that are tweaked a tiny bit from level to level. The most annoying one is the "Sumo" challenge where you have to knock a certain number of (18 actually, for every level it's always 18) enemies out of a glowing purple ring. To do this requires either punching them a few times, at which point they suddenly shoot through the air way farther then they should based on how hard it appears you are hitting them. Or you can throw crap at them, knock them on their butts and then pick them up and toss them out. These side quests are just painfully stupid. The stupidest part about them is that if your character gets outside the ring you have 3 seconds to get back in before the mission instantly fails. Now 3 seconds seems like a long time, but not when your "recovery" animation takes up the entire 3 seconds. So when you get knocked out by your enemy you do your stupid little recover animation, then get to watch in vain as your timer makes it to zero and you have to start all over. Just great! Why not make the round instantly end if you get knocked out? Sheer stupidity.
One of the other annoying glitches with the game is that you can't really climb buildings that have been blown up. They are blown up, but there is still a pretty clear frame where the building was. It looks perfectly climbable, but sadly it is not. No matter how badly you want to get up there and claim the yellow box as your prize, you just can't do it. You have to reload the level, or run around long enough for the building to magically become new again.
The most fun I had with this game was hunting down some of the "find 100 of these yellow boxes" side quests. Mostly because I didn't have to fight anything and I could just drive around hitting the magical transform button all the time. But even this wears thin after a very short time.
This game shouldn't even be mentioned in the same breath as the recently released movie. It is, quite frankly, a mockery of everything that Transformers has ever produced, even the crap that has come from the franchise. This game easily sets a new low for the cash-in genre and does absolutely nothing to position Traveler's Tales as a noteworthy developer. If anything I would just keep this game in mind whenever I see their name on a game as a reminder to avoid any future turds they manage to crap into game boxes.
At least I snagged about 300 stupid easy achievement points for playing what I did.