If you’re a fan of the new Transformers movie and find yourself with 50 bucks in your pocket, here’s a list of better ways you can spend that money, other than spending it on Transformers: The Game for the Nintendo Wii: see the movie five times; buy a bunch of the new movie toys and act out your favorite scenes; crank call Peter Cullen and ask him if he has Ultra Magnus in a can.
Transformers: The Game, from Activision and Traveller’s Tales, loosely mirrors the plot of the latest Transformers movie, as you are placed in the role of various Autobots and Decepticons sent to either protect humanity, or destroy it. Whichever side you choose, you’ll be tasked with playing the same mission types over and over again while fighting horrible controls and useless weapons.
The game starts out promisingly enough. The opening cinematic, done by Blur Studios, the group behind Marvel: Ultimate Alliance’s amazing cinematics, help get the player in the mood for some serious robotic destruction. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. Players are asked to pick a faction, either Autobots or Decepticons, and start off as either Bumblebee or Blackout.
The character models are straight from the movie, and while not as detailed as their movie, or 360/PS3 counterparts, show a good amount of detail and move as you would expect a 30-foot tall robot would move. Everything in Transformers: The Game can be damaged to a certain degree (cars, trees, etc.) while buildings and larger structures can be damaged to the point of near collapse. The Wii’s hardware is able to keep up with all of the robotic action and destruction, outputting in progressive scan while maintaining a solid frame rate, only faltering when there is a large amount of activity.
It’s a shame the controls aren’t as tight as the visuals are pretty. Movement is handled via the nunchuk’s thumb stick with melee attacks performed by shaking the Wiimote from side to side. The Z button allows you to lock on to a target, which is crucial, lest your three move melee animation takes you through your target and on to whupping up on the local orphanage. Light weapons are mapped to the B button and heavy weapons are mapped to the A button. Both weapons might as well be mapped to your mom’s good silverware for all of the good they do. Even Ironhide, the so called weapons specialist, has guns that shoot nothing but sunshine and rainbows. Players pick up objects with the C button, and throw with either another press of the C button or with an overhand swing of the remote.
Camera control is handled by pointing the Wiimote around the screen or by recentering with a press of the minus button. Jumping, blocking and transforming are all handled with the D-pad. Strangely enough, jumping is performed by pressing the down arrow, while transforming is handled by pressing the up button. This is as counterintuitive as it sounds, and you’ll find yourself leaping for joy rather than transforming and losing precious seconds off of your time.
The clumsiness of the controls makes combat a somewhat uneven experience. When it’s just a straight up “destroy everything that moves” Decepticon mission, or just a matter of beating up on one or two drones, the controls work fairly well. Locking on enemies is simple and as long as you’re locked on, your weapons will find their mark. Where problems occur is when there are a lot of enemies on screen, requiring constant camera control or when the more advanced drones appear. These drones have a constant spinning attack which doubles as a block to all of your conventional attacks and can only be damaged by first throwing something at them to knock them out of their pattern and then battling them in melee. The same holds true for boss battles which all fall into the same pattern of beat up the drones, pick something up, throw it at the boss, run up and melee him, repeat until he dies or you die and/or give up.
