Once upon a time, a toy company decided to market their newest product line with a tie-in television show. Toy designers loved the idea for the creativity they could build into the line, providing detailed back stories for each figurine so their owners wouldn't have to. Executives loved the idea that each 22-minute episode would amount to a massive advertisement. And kids loved it because they'd get a double dose of the toys.

Years later, long after most kids sold their action figures in garage sales, someone in the relatively abstract idea called Hollywood decided that nostalgia never really dies, it just hibernates, and put plans in motion to create a live-action version of a brand of toys from the 1980s. And when you make a giant blockbuster movie, you've gotta have a tie-in video game to go along with it.

This is why gamers are being subjected to Transformers: The Game.

Transformers: The Movie, currently playing in theaters, is a big, loud summer action extravaganza. It's not a spoiler to mention that if you're sitting in the theater, bucket of overpriced popcorn on your lap, you're going to witness larger than life computer-generated robots with simplistic personalities cause the near-total destruction of an urban environment. If this same experience had been translated to the Xbox 360 or PS3 title, recommending the game would be a no-brainer. Instead, Transformers offers a clumsy experience tied to one of the saddest implementations of an open ended mission play model to grace this newest generation of consoles.

Players can follow either the heroic Autobots or vile Decepticons through an abstraction of the film's plotline, often taking place during moments not shown or only hinted at on celluloid. You're given control of one of the former residents of Cybertron and placed into an open environment, with one mission marker available to you at a time. These missions often shoehorn derivative gameplay goals into plot points from the film. Sam Witwicky, who holds the only clue to the location of a Cybertron treasure called the All-Spark, wants to buy a new car; you're going to have to race Decepticon drones to the car dealership to make sure he buys you instead of the bad guys! Of course, you're going to wreck havoc throughout the city to do so, and Sam will be none the wiser, but let's not worry about that.

If you don't want to plod through the storyline, you can wander these environments (often nameless urban cityscapes, but also army bases and even the Hoover Dam) searching for various collectibles used for unlocking sub-missions. These are distractions at best, consisting of menial tasks like collecting twenty cogs in a given area or slaughtering thirty innocent motorists in a given time. The reward for these diversions comes in the form of bonus content, including stills, trailers and promotional videos from the movie. If you're really lucky, you'll unlock alternate outfits for your Transformers, dressing them up in skins from the original 1980s cartoon. None of these extra features are very compelling—why would you want to view trailers for a movie you're playing the game for? Still, it's nice to see Prime and his pals in their original cartoon configurations.

While this pale imitation of sandbox gameplay is frustrating, it's the driving mechanics and physics that destroy any last chance for fun in Transformers. Players spend the majority of their time in vehicle form, because the Transformers are as slow and cumbersome as you'd expect from a giant robot. But driving through nameless city streets and underground bunkers is made infuriating by the squirrelly controls and the weightless way your vehicle turns. You will fishtail out of control while chasing nameless enemy drones through the city, and you'll curse every time you get stuck.