Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Review - More then meets the eye?

It's the loudest, most bombastic action movie franchise around and this year's biggest, most bloated big budget blockbuster, so of course there's an equally large and brainless videogame attached to it. We're talking of course about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the eagerly anticipated sequel to Michael Bay's orgy of gigantic robot toys beating the nuts and bolts out of one another. Less eagerly anticipated is this videogame, itself a sequel to the original lacklustre tie-in based upon the first movie.

So, it's with very low expectations that we approach the videogame incarnation of the new Transformers movie, especially having been subjected to such a dull, shoddy predecessor. Revenge of the Fallen is much as you'd expect, that is 46 missions of robot scrapping mayhem all set within the movie's various locations. Opening with the choice of whether to play the campaign as Autobot or Decepticon, you then have to endure a fairly lengthy tutorial stage, which fills you in on the game's odd control system that takes some getting used to.

For a game that's supposed to appeal generally towards a more casual audience, Transformers' controls are surprisingly complicated. Of course, they don't present a challenge to seasoned gamers like ourselves, but mapping the transform button to the same trigger used for firing your weapon is a pretty bad idea by any game's standards. What's more, you have to keep the trigger held to stay transformed and then accelerate, which also shifts your weapon to a face button. Surely it would have made far more sense to use a single button to toggle between states as in the actually rather good PS2 Transformers game from 2004.

Developer Luxoflux has heaped problem upon problem where the controls are concerned, as it's too easy to let go of the right trigger and unintentionally revert back and forth between forms, which is just plain irritating. A third-person shooter in a very similar vein to the first game, Revenge of the Fallen dumps you into a number of hemmed-in arenas where you're either aiming and firing relentlessly with the left trigger held down to bring up your crosshair or relentlessly pressing the same single button to keep punching away. When shooting, a bit of gentle auto-aim is welcome due to the frustratingly frantic nature of the firefights, which invariably involve robots flying around your head, driving away from you or shooting you from the nearest high vantage point.

The enemy AI is utterly unchallenging too, normally requiring you to shoot at a distant robot who's rooted firmly to the spot or one that retreats and climbs a building as soon as you get too close to it. Boss battles don't exactly up the ante either, usually adopting the same attack patterns favoured by their cookie cutter counterparts, but with a far greater level of attrition required to finish them off.

Each level should have been a playground of raucous robot action, but instead you're presented with bland, repetitious shooting or unsatisfying, button mashing melee combat in utterly uninspired locations. While the amount of environmental destruction you can cause is fairly admirable, it's entirely cosmetic and even something as simple as being able to pick up and throw items of scenery is conspicuously absent. Being able to claw your way up buildings is a nice touch, as is the variety of Transformers on offer that allow you to drive and fly around each of the games adequately sized levels.

However, the limited objectives you're given to complete are generally of the same recycled escort and protect, destroy X number of enemies or activate satellite arrays from any number of games, each of which involve the same procedure of grinding away fighting a set number of multiple robots, one after another. It's an activity that wears very thin, very quickly as there's very little refinement or depth to the constant hammering of buttons as enemies line up to be smashed into their component parts.

You can see that some effort has gone into attempting to make Revenge of the Fallen something more accomplished than the standard movie related fare, with collectible Energon acting as currency to upgrade your abilities and a whole raft of worthwhile unlockables including original episodes of the 1984 animated series available for meeting certain requirements. Yet, when the fundamental gameplay itself is this slight and spread so thinly across 46 stages, the entire experience falls flat by the time you've reached about the halfway point of either of the two campaigns.

Only those with heroic stoicism and perseverance or a penchant for punishing, samey gameplay will stick with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Once you've played one level, you've pretty much played them all and even the lure of beating your previous times to garner medals and gain bonus content won't be enough to tempt you back. Each level is preceded by a dull, translucent blue 3D map detailing your mission goals and book-ended by staid cut scenes where your chosen faction have a boring, melodramatic chat about the mission you've just completed. Yawn.

As movie licenses go, Transformers should really be a shoo-in to make a great game. Instead, we're given yet another entry into the annals of dishwater-dull movie games, devoid of anything truly interesting or special. Revenge of the Fallen is strictly by the numbers stuff that while arguably superior to a great deal of film tie-ins, is still decidedly average. Multiplayer goes some way to making up for the single-player campaign's shortcomings with decent deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag modes, but beyond this diverting online element, there simply aren't enough reasons for RotF to hold your interest.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was never going to be an exception to the rule where movie games are concerned, but we expect a bit more from something that has you playing as a colossal transforming robot. Too much repetition and an iffy control system transform a potentially enjoyable experience into something altogether more predictably banal and uninteresting. Playable in single-player for a couple of hours at a push, multiplayer offers something with a little extra lastability which goes some way to redeeming the overall package, although a complete lack of polish and presentation mars every inch of the game. For these robots in disguise there really isn't more to them than meets the eye. Revenge of the Fallen is exactly what we were expecting. No more, no less.

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