By Dylan Moran
You know how when you were a kid and your parents would talk about a TV show or movie remake ruining their childhood memories?
I never understood that until Michael Bay destroyed the Transformers franchise. But the games have been OK, and last year’s iteration War for Cybertron, was great.
So I came into Dark of the Moon cautiously optimistic, and was slightly well-served.
It’s a decent enough game and does what it says on the box – you play as all the Transformers you know and love, switching seamlessly between robot and car, jet, plane, tank, whatever form your character chose to take in the movie.
The problem I have is you only get to play as these Autobots and Decepticons for one or two levels each. It’s meant to be a story filler sure; but couldn’t we have had the same story mode with the character of our choosing throughout? As it stands there are about four characters on each side you play as.
The story in this game is actually fantastic, and speaking as someone who hasn’t seen Dark of the Moon at the movies yet (I’m still in therapy from the scars inflicted on me by Revenge of the Fallen) it seems to be a great primer for what to expect in the film and a bridging course between what happened in Egypt and what’s about to happen.
That being said, there’s a really odd feel to the game. Something which is never quite explained is that all Transformers now operate in a ‘stealth force’ mode. What that actually means is “your weapons will stick out of your car/plane when you’re in vehicle mode”. It makes them look pretty beastly and does mean you don’t have to choose between car mode or bot mode, but should be better explained.
As should the controls. In the earlier levels you’re given the rundown of ‘this does that, that does this’, as always at the start of games. Except when the game tells you ‘push RB to use boost’ what it really means is ‘push RB AND RT to use boost’. Bit confusing.
But I guess there’s not much reason to explain the controls properly when they’re different for each vehicle mode (irritating), and a lot of them make no sense at all (annoying). For example, when driving the left thumbstick controls go to whoa while the right thumbstick controls turning.
I have played a lot of console racing games ever since Gran Turismo 1 and the first port of Need for Speed. No racing/driving game has ever used this control layout.
Add to this that driving the cars doesn’t feel much like driving cars at all, more like controlling hovercrafts. I was sitting there mightily confused until I just said to myself ‘you’re playing a game about fighting robots from outer-space. Logic is out the window‘. But if a game relies on you to explain that to yourself – and that’s the only explanation for it – it’s a flaw and is going to annoy people.
So at the end of the day the game was slightly better than the two movies I’ve seen in the franchise, and I really enjoyed the storyline. It’s a shame the gameplay let it down but I see there’s a new, fuller, Transformers game in the pipeline which will hopefully get longer (this game only takes about 8 hours to play through on hard, even with all the times you’ll die) and make more sense gameplay wise.
Perhaps we could swap the game team with the movie team? I’m sure Michael Bay can’t stuff up a videogame, right?
3 News
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
:: Publisher: Activision
:: Developer: High Moon Studios
:: Format reviewed: Xbox 360
:: Rating: M