Special note should be made of the voice work, which is some of the best voice work you’ll find on a handheld game. Multiple voice actors from the Transformers series, including Peter Cullen and Frank Welker, reprise their roles and even the generic Autobot/Decepticon solder is voiced well. The dialog is well written and helps to flesh out the story, especially among the Decepticons, whose interactions were sorely missed in the Transformers movie.
If you want to mix it up with other players, four player local multiplayer is your only option, however each player needs to have their own cartridge. The other, more interesting and more fun aspect of multiplayer is the Battle for the Allspark. Players can log on each day to the Battle’s server via the DS’s Wi-Fi connectivity, and obtain a challenge. The challenge may be to throw as many objects as you can in a certain amount of time, or destroy as much stuff as you can within the time limit. Once you’ve completed the challenge, your high score is uploaded to the server. Each day, the faction with the most points wins that day’s piece of the Allspark and after seven days, the faction with the most pieces wins the Battle and the war is reset. Players obtain Wi-Fi tokens for participating in the Battle, as well as for winning pieces and winning the week’s Battle. These tokens are then used to unlock special vehicle forms.
Ultimately, there isn’t much of a difference between the two versions of the game to warrant buying each of them at the 30 dollar price point. With the exception of the Decepticons getting experience for destroying inanimate objects, the missions have the same structure between versions as are the generic vehicle forms. Unless you’re really big on playing as a particular character, you’re going to get the same uninspiring missions, dodgy controls and great voice work whichever version you choose. Transformers: Autobots and Transformers: Decepticons represent the best of the current crop of Transformers video games, but they’re still just a weak movie tie-in.
