Review - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (XBox 360)

(Please note: Many reviewers have made comparisons to the new Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen game and its predecessor, Transformers: The Game released in 2007. I did not play the 2007 game, nor do I plan to. So if you’re looking for a side-by-side comparison, you will not find it here. My review is based solely on the merits of Transformers: RotF as a standalone title.)
 
Michael Bay’s latest blockbuster, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, has set a precedent by being universally dismissed as a piece of garbage while setting records for box office sales.
 
The converse seems to apply to the movie’s tie-in game of the same title, which provides a satisfactory single-player experience along with some awesome in-game rewards but is apparently failing to sell across all platforms. As I write this, no version of the game is even in the top 50 of weekly game sales charts, despite receiving generally positive reviews (Metacritic scores of 67 [PS3] and 64 [Xbox]).
 
Despite the flaws of its theatrical counterpart and a prequel that has received abysmal reviews across the board, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an entertaining game with particularly high replay value on the single-player side due to in-game challenges and rewards. Unfortunately, a slow, ugly multiplayer experience unfortunately drags the title down to the realm of commonness.
 
Players begin the game by choosing either the Autobot or Decepticon campaign. The two narratives are refreshingly different. The Autobot story focuses on protecting humans and maintaining military infrastructure, while the Decepticon side is all about death and destruction. (SPOILERS) And the campaigns include nice character  development moments such as Starscream—ever the failure in Megatron’s eyes—trying to capture several informants but accidentally killing them all in the process. Unfortunately, the developers could not figure out how to properly end the Decepticon campaign, and so they opted for the easy way out: having Megatron confront and destroy The Fallen, just as Optimus does in the Autobot campaign. As anyone who has seen the film will tell you, this just doesn’t fit the backstory.
 
Single-player gameplay is fun and the controls generally effective. Missions vary from simply destroying all enemies in a particular area to finding and rescuing/killing humans or protecting/destroying targets. The range of weapons and special abilities of each Transformer encourages multiple playthroughs. The environments are mostly bland, but the ability to climb up buildings rather quickly adds a cool vertical component to the battles. The Transformers themselves feel appropriate: big and slow, but also powerful at the same time.
 
Replay value of the single-player campaign is fairly high. Each mission runs a timer, and depending on the speed with which the mission is completed, a medal is assigned. The missions are short and exciting enough to make multiple replays appealing, even if only to upgrade from Silver to Gold medals. What’s more, the game includes its own internal achievement system. Both campaigns include “unlockables,” goals for the player to complete which grant access to bonus material like artist renderings. And in perhaps the greatest fanboy achievement in recent video game history, six of the game’s unlockables open up full-length episodes of the original Transformers cartoon series. I discovered this on my own after unlocking one of the episodes, and I sat with my kids and watched “War on the Dinobots” twice in a row. For my dollar, the replay value and the six original episodes make purchasing this game a very enticing proposition.
 
The developers made an aggravating decision by assigning the “transform” function to the right trigger (RT). This means players must hold down RT as long as they wish to be in vehicle mode, which causes some confusion, especially in a firefight. My initial instinct when facing the bad guys is to shoot from the hip—using RT. But that caused me to transform and resulted in confusion and hysteria on the part of yours truly. It took nearly an entire playthrough for me to acclimate to holding down LT to enter “weapon mode” as a robot and only then pull RT to fire. In a game that’s all about transforming robots, it is critical to get the whole “transforming” part right. This game failed in that respect.
 
What’s more, transformation generally serves no purpose in the game. At no point in either campaign did I find it absolutely necessary to be in vehicle mode. Even in the middle of the ocean faced with moving among multiple aircraft carriers, I chose first to jump from ship to ship rather than transform Breakaway into a plane and fly around. (Breakaway’s sniper rifle also made it possible to kill nearly every enemy from distance.) I would have liked to see more purpose to the transformations.
 
Multiplayer is the low point of this game. Every Transformer is slow and clunky, which may be acceptable when battling AI opponents in single-player campaigns. But in a multiplayer environment it’s just annoying. What’s more the size of the Transformers in the third-person perspective blocks out a substantial portion of the field of vision, a big no-no in multiplayer. Occasionally I was shot by a Transformer standing directly in front of me, and I still couldn’t see him. What struck me as most frustrating, however, was the apparently disproportion of powers among Transformers. I am naturally drawn to play the sniper in multiplayer shooters, so I spent some time playing as Breakaway. And nearly every time I was killed with a single shot from one of the players using Megatron. This would be acceptable had the developers made Breakaway’s sniper rifle more powerful, but as it is I needed four or five direct hits (Yes, even to the head…) just to bring down one Megatron. (Adding to my frustration was the fact that nearly every Decepticon opponent I faced over several hours of multiplayer gameplay used Megatron, whose primary weapon is apparently a one-shot-one-kill.) Spawn camping was rampant, and even with a short period of invulnerability after respawning, many opponents still managed to get the drop on me after spawning, usually from distance. On top of it all, the average team deathmatch game lasts something like 20 minutes at least (best out of three, with ten-minute rounds). After a couple of hours clunking those big robots around to their doom, I just gave up.
 
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a solid single-player experience with a forgettable—often regrettable—multiplayer component. Fanboys of the original series and toy line may not appreciate Michael Bay’s vision of their robotic alien heroes. But the inclusion of six original cartoon episodes might at least entice some to pick up a used copy of the game.

UPDATE: For those of you with kids who are just getting into gaming, this is an excellent title to teach them fundamental third-person controls. My two five-year-olds are now fully proficient at using a dual-analog stick controller in the third-person POV thanks to this game's introductory tutorial mission. The tutorial has a timer, like every other mission in the game, but you can ignore the timer and simply explore the game world for as long as you like. By doing this, my kids learned how the game works and were able to start completing real missions after only a couple of days. Plus the violence is all robot-on-robot, and there is no bloodshed.