Format: Xbox360/PS3/Wii/PC/PS2 | Genre: Action | Publisher: Activision | Developer: Luxoflux | Released: 26/06/09 | RRP: £24.99-£39.99

By Greg Giddens

Movie tie-in games are notorious for being crap.  Very few turn out adequately, and fewer still turn out to be good. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen sits right in the middle of the spectrum, but although it had so much more potential, it’s still better than most.

//Absence makes the heart grow fonder
We’ve been deprived in recent years of good robot games. No Mech Warrior games, no good Armoured Core games – the sub-genre has been pretty quiet. For that reason, Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen does offer an experience we haven’t had in a while, and in many ways it’s well presented. Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen is certainly a better game than the original, but there are breaks in the narrative flow that distract from the otherwise fun experience.

The story loosely follows the film, but instead of forcing you to play through scenes in the movie you play two distinct campaigns – Autobots and Decepticons. Each campaign differs from the film’s story, allowing you to experience slightly different events. Add certain missions from both campaigns together and you can recreate the film, but the decision to promote a deeper and more fulfilling role by having the two campaigns allows for a much more intriguing game.

The ideas behind the campaigns are great, but the narrative suffers with dull mission briefings and debriefings, and a perplexing lack of cut-scenes and scripted sequences. There’s no real flow to the missions: you play through one, you’re “treated” to a quick summary of what’s going on and how well you did, then it’s off to the next. The briefing area is also a rather dull environment, void of light and eye candy; instead, it’s just a holographic map of the planet with Transformers standing around it talking. Perhaps the problems with this narrative flow are more due to inherency from its film father – and one does get the feeling that, if a fresh story was created instead of loosely following the films, a better game could have been made. Either way, a cinematic show of progression is greatly lacking.

In and out of missions, you will be guided through the story by different characters from the film, all voiced by their respective actors. It’s fantastic to hear the actors voicing their videogame counterparts, but some of the lines are unconvincing, some are badly written and other times they’re badly edited together. The saving grace of the voice problems would be Peter Cullen who voices Optimus Prime, and Hugo Weaving who voices Megatron. It doesn’t matter what they say. They’ll always sound cool.

Generally, though, the voice acting isn’t too bad, and adds some much-needed life to the presentation, but the graphics do little improve upon it. Although the majority of the Transformers look great, the environments are uninspired. The main Transformers look just as good as they do in the film, but the “minion” Transformers are very generic and lacking in detail – as are the buildings, which look very plain, lacking in textures. Further damaging the presentation are the small levels, lacking in design flare. Destructible environments are missing, something that feels almost necessary due to the nature of the film. Inadequacies aside, the lighting is very good – never is it too dark or bright – and the weapons firing and explosions are pretty good as well.

[Continues...]