Decepticons version

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – Decepticons is a third-person action-adventure game from Activision and Vicarious Visions based on the latest robots-and-explosions movie from Michael Bay.  Oh, and it’s based on some series from the 80s or something.

Licensed games.  Yeah, I can see a few of you wince at those words from here.  It’s a sad fact that, a good 98% of the time, no matter how awesome the property, no matter how mindbogglingly simple it would be to create a stupendously fantastic game based around said property, someone, somewhere along the line will bugger it up.  Don’t take my word for it, grab a sample dozen titles and play them for a few hours.  Sure, there’s the occasional gems – Goldeneye and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay are two of the ones most often remembered – but for every one or two of those, there’s a thousand Spongebob Squarepants games clogging up the bargain bins.  It’s hard to say who’s most at fault.  No one wants to make a bad game (I would hope) but sooner or later, corners have to be cut, deadlines have to be drawn, and the publishers have to hope that people will buy on the strength of the name, rather than the quality of the title.

So, sad to say, but by the sheer weight of history, the odds are not stacked in the favour of Transformers: Rise of the Fallen.  But, there’s always a chance it could turn out to be good.  After all, no one ever expected Spider-Man 2 to be as ludicrously fun as it was.

From the off, things start off pretty well.  The intro gives you a quick rundown of the story so far: after the events of the last film (and games), Megatron is dead, the Allspark is destroyed, and the Decepticons now follow a being ominously referred to as The Fallen.  As the Decepticons skulk around preparing to revive their original leader, a Protoform, a Transformer with no vehicle mode and no real allegiance to either side, falls to earth and the Autobots and ‘Cons race to claim it.  In the Autobots version of the game, obviously, you side with with them and go off and have merry adventures helping fleshlings and other carbon-based life-forms.  But this is the Decepticon version, so you, as the Protoform, get to tell Optimus Prime himself – hero to all kids of the 80s, voiced, of course, by the one and only Peter Cullen – to cram it in his data port.  Not a bad way to start things off.

Once you actually get into the game itself, the fun times continue.  You’re given the chance of taking on one of three different vehicle modes, your typical ’speedy but weak/slow but strong/all-rounder’ choices.  The biggest thing it affects is your movement speed, since the stats themselves can be altered later.  I chose the all-rounder, because I’m boring like that, and was away.  The tutorial stage is a simple affair, teaching you how to attack, lock on to enemies and change into your alt-mode.  While transformed, you can’t attack, but you’re faster and can turbo boost for a limited time, which is vitally important, especially in later stages.  You start off with a choice of two weapons, a weak popgun and a harder-hitting rocket launcher, and as you play, you’ll notice a few more nice touches.  Most obviously, the transforming noise is ripped right out the cartoon, but many of the weapon sound effects are also direct from the original show.  It’s a surgical strike direct to the nostalgia gland, and it works well.  I was soon cheerfully driving around, shooting the hell out of Autobots and army vehicles alike, being unspeakably mean to anything that wasn’t me.  Great fun.

If only that fun were to last.

The flaws creep in when you’re not looking, you see.  They sneak up on you when you least expect it.  Take, for instance, the collision detection.  More than once, I was shooting at a foe and found myself repeatedly missing them.  Fair enough, I thought, I’m in a pretty frantic battle, not particularly surprising.  Then, after the fight, I noticed that my weapon was marked as having ‘perfect aim’.  That was actually listed as its primary strength, the fact that whatever I aimed at would take damage no matter what.  Then I remembered that you have to lock on to an enemy in order to use the guns in the first place, the standard attack being a basic melee swipe.  The final blow came when it hit me that the stage consisted mainly of stationary missile turrets, and that failing to hit a foe that just sat there was inexcusable.  It happens as well if you get too close to an enemy, the pair of you will start dancing around each other, neither doing any damage whatsoever.

Of course, the combat in general is sadly basic as well.  There’s nothing in this game that can’t be solved with the careful application of jumping, circle-strafing and explosives.  You can literally run rings around your foes, firing like a lunatic as you go, and get out of virtually any conflict unscathed.  The game gives you a fairly decent variety of weapons, with more unlocked in each level, from machine guns, to grenade launchers to freeze guns.  Also unlocked are new equipment and add-ons for your ‘Con, improving your damage output, health, defence and so on.  These stats can also be upgraded by spending Energon, gained by defeating enemies and by completing levels.  I’ll cheerfully admit I’m a complete sucker for upgradable characters in my action games, but it’s hard to tell if these upgrades actually have any effect at all.  I’d pretty much maxed out my defence by about the halfway mark, but I was still getting lumps kicked out of me at every turn.

The most irritating things, however, are the three things T:RotF loves to do the most.  First is scanning.  You’ll find you have to do that at least once every other mission at the start, but the further in you go, the more it happens, to the point where entire missions consist of scanning and shooting.  Of course, while scanning, you’re utterly defenceless, and while you can stop at any time and deal with major threats, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s tedious as hell.  Doesn’t help that you’re usually under a strict time limit as well, the second big love of the game.  When the game’s about a third of the way in, almost every mission will have at least one timed portion, and the time limits are very unforgiving.  One of the worst is a mission where you need to trigger two nuclear missiles in 60 seconds or less, while under heavy fire, and both of them are at opposite ends of the facility from each other.  Oh and you need to scan them, which takes about 4 or 5 seconds to do.  To put this into perspective, I found this damn near impossible to do.  I’m not about to proclaim myself some kind of gaming demi-god, but how a kid, the game’s obvious target audience – or anyone else for that matter – is supposed to do that without getting hideously frustrated is beyond me.  It goes way beyond challenging to a point where it just stops being fun anymore, and even Gamer’s Pride – that moment of resolve where you swear this game shall fall by your hand – gives up and goes home in the face of it.

Finally, there’s the third trick the game plays: missile strikes.  It doesn’t matter where you are, what you’re doing, you can pretty much rest assured you’re never more than 25 seconds away from having a ton of missiles dropped directly on your head.  In the desert, the middle of a city, even in the middle of a military facility (and when I mean the middle, I mean square in the centre of the actual building itself), no matter where you are, these missiles will find you and take an unhealthy bite out of your health.  The only way to stop them is to clear the area, but of course, you’re never given any indication of that, and it doesn’t make things any easier, as pretty much every enemy, bar some of the Autobots, is armed with exploding rockets that do blast radius damage.  Your weapons, for what its worth, don’t have nearly as much clout with their blast radius.  If there was any kind of any specific dodge manoeuvre, that would be a big help, but other than a quick boost when you change forms (which the game doesn’t even tell you about) unless I’m missing something, there is none.  Combine this with the scanning and the strict time limits, and you have an unholy trinity, determined to conspire against you in the worst ways possible to ruin your fun at every turn.

The multiplayer side of things offers at least one bright light.  While there’s the usual ‘link-up with your friends and kill them’-style deathmatch, allowing players who own either version of the game to pound on each other with the named characters from the story or their character from the main game, there’s also a special mode called Battle For Earth, which lets players duke it out for fame and glory, a list of the best players available on the official website.  The missions are more or less the same as the ones available in the main storyline, so it’s not ‘true’ DLC, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction for any DS owners looking at their console-owning comrades in jealousy.

I could go on about all the flaws, problems and outright glitches, but I think you get the point by now.  Despite the hopes held for it at the start of the review, this is yet another quick cash in, pushed out to capitalise on a big movie release.  Exactly how they managed to screw up a game where giant robots punch the crap out each other is beyond me, but they found a way.  Sure, you could get it for a younger sibling or cousin, and they’d probably get some fun out of it, but with games out there like Super Princess Peach, or the upcoming Scribblenauts on the horizon, why bother?  Get them something decent, rather than giving in to a fad.  They’ll thank you later.

+ Plenty of throwbacks to classic Transformers
+ RPG elements allow you to customize your play-style

- Stupidly frustrating for adults, let alone kids
- Boss fights are literally all the same
- Combat is often inaccurate
- Too many timed sections with too tight a time limit and often no way to increase it
- Only boss levels have checkpoints, regular stages require an entire restart
- Short: I blazed through the first half of the game in a single sitting

Score – 3/10