TRANSFORMERS IS ONE OF THE MOST poorly designed games to hit consoles this year. How they could take something as intrinsically cool as giant transformable robots fighting each other and make such a broken, mediocre game is a question for the ages. The main issue here is a pile of design cliches. For example: How do you get the player to use that awesome transforming ability in the game? Answer: Fill the thing with one timed event after another. Race some Decepticons to the used-car lot so that Sam Witwicky can buy you the next day. Race around the city as Ironhide to help Jazz (apparently the most helpless robot in creation) fight off an endless swarm of Decepticon drones. Almost every single Autobot mission plays out like this.

And when you get there? The game sets up an artificial battlefield border (that you'll have to check your radar to see). Leave this border for too long, and you have to start your whole mission over. Did you throw an enemy a block away? Don't bother going over there and fighting him. Again, leave that border and your mission
is over. Playing as a Decepticon is marginally more enjoyable, if only because your sole purpose is to wreak as much havoc as possible. Plus these evil robots are more fun to control, since flying becomes a way of getting to each location much quicker.
To flesh out the whole thing, you've got a bunch of knickknacks to find and really uninspired bonus missions to play through in each level. But much like the rest of the game, none of these bring any real variety or fun to the experience.

Oh, and if you're a huge Transformers fan who's pretty much decided to grab this game already, do yourself a favor and stick to the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions. The developers' attempt to graft the traditional control scheme to the Remote/Nunchuk system on the Wii wasn't successful in the least. The real tragedy here is that a simple attempt to emulate Atari's 2004 Transformers game would have made this movie tie-in an order of magnitude better. As is, those looking for a Transformers fix should scour the bargain bins for that classic, and leave this one on the shelf.

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