Revenge of the incredibly poor movie tie-in game

The original Transformers movie game was possibly the first movie game I actually rated as good. Mainly because it had pretty nice graphics, some fun gameplay, and somehow managed to combine driving and beat-em-up gameplay without completely fucking it up. That's not to say it's without flaws, it did have some, like the inability to transform in midair and some nasty camera bugs. Sadly, the same cannot be said for its sequel. Bare in mind I've only played 60% of the autobot campaign and a fair bit of online so far, I've not yet started on the decepticons.

The first major problem with the game is the new control scheme. The first game had the brilliant notion of assigning transforming to a single face button, so you could toggle in and out, and acceleration and braking were assigned to the triggers, as per normal games. Instead, in revenge of the fallen, transformation is applied to the trigger. As well as acceleration. Thus meaning, you can't be in vehicle mode without accelerating. Which is the biggest pain in the ass, as half the trigger needs to be pushed down to transform into the vehicle, then the other half varies speed. A whole 3mm varies your speed. Thus making it impossible to go slow or stop whilst in vehicle mode at all, leaving you speeding along, careening round corners and smashing into any oncoming traffic. The left trigger controls "drifting", so you can drift around bends and pull off 180 handbrake turns, but it doesn't allow you to brake gently or with any form of precision. I'm unsure as to why it is even assigned to a trigger, considering you have to pull the trigger on full to even activate it.
These can be combined with some fiddly other button moves to allow some interesting transformations. Hold R trigger, then X, then release R whilst still holding X and you transform into a flying kick. R + A using the above rules = Crazy transformation jump. R + B = angry stompy move. None of these are particuarly useful though, as the fact your hurtling along at god knows what speed makes actually taking off at the right time and firmly planting your feet into an enemy bot excruciatingly difficult.



The next big problem is the new "War Room", where you can view a holographic globe and pick the mission you want to play, thus avoiding the linear plot of the first game. Whilst this seems like a good idea, it results in you still playing a linear plotline due to the fact only one mission is available, and then completing this unlocks another single mission. The entire game continues in this way, so you are always stuck with only one new mission to play. You can go back and re-do missions to gain more points, but that was in the first game and it's hardly removing the linear aspect.

Combat is neither on par with the first game, where you could pretty much rip anything out of the street and use it to beat your enemies round the head with. Wielding a lampost like a golfclub or a giant donut like a frisbee made the first game a lot more interesting and allowed for a bit of variation in combat. The new game does away with that completely, instead allowing you to either punch your enemies, or whilst in bot mode, hold down L trigger to go into "combat mode", and then use RB to select your weapon (Each character has 2), before using the R trigger to fire. Yes. The R trigger serves just about every purpose in the game apart from jump (That's A).
Each character has their own melee weapon, but for the most part it feels like the same animations are used, simply reskinned to a different character. The only person who feels vaguely different is optimus, because he gets his TWO GIANT ENERGON BLADES to slash the shit out of everything.



For a game coming 2 years later, a graphical improvement is expected. Instead, the graphics are seemingly worse, not helped by the majority of levels being rather dark and murky, making it rather difficult to see anything. Transformations are no way near as interesting as before, although you no longer have to be on the ground to do them, which is a marked improvement. In the original, you couldn't jump off a building, transform on the way down, then land and speed off as a car. Or even jump off and transform into a plane whilst falling. You had to wait to hit the floor. Same for going from vehicle to bot (apart from planes, obviously). In this one, you can transform whenever the hell you like, which makes moving around a bit easier.

Making up for it a bit though, is the online multiplayer, something the initial game was sorely lacking. Whilst it doesn't allow you to play campaign through with a team of 'bots, it does allow a variety of multiplayer battles, ranging from team deathmatches, capture the flag, and base assaults. It's good fun and adds a lot to the game, but still uses the same awful controls. The addition of extra 'bots to play as is nice, and the levels are quite nice, with big open areas, heavily defended areas, and tight corners to fight in.

The game also sadly lacks the fun factor of G1 from the first game, where you could unlock G1 colours for Prime, Jazz and Starscream, as well as full G1 Versions of Prime and Megatron. This allowed for a bit more fun, charging around levels as the original prime and generally causing havock. Like so:

This one instead brings only one G1 colours unlockable, for ironhide, and let's be honest, who wants a bright red GMC pickup? G1 colours for Ratchet or Bee would be better. The rest of the unlockables are G1 episodes, which is nice for original fans, but I suspect the majority of younger fans playing will unlock them and go "What the hell is that?". Rather than G1 episodes, G1 versions of all the characters would have been a lot more rewarding.

Personally, I'd give it 5/10 so far. This score might bump up depending on how the rest of the game goes, but once I've completed both campaigns, i'm trading it in for prototype or Left4Dead.