Autobots War Of Transformers

The Game is a big, loud, shallow action game that severely lacks in content.

The Game is a big, loud, shallow action game that severely lacks in content.

The Game is very much the archetypal movie-licensed game. It's got all the hallmark problems of the genre, including short length, overly simplistic mechanics, a barely-there story, and a bit of a sloppy feel. It is simply an excuse for fans of the upcoming live action film (and maybe even some fans of the old cartoons who, admittedly, will take pretty much anything they can get at this point) to run around, awkwardly beating up Autobots or Decepticons in various semidestructible environments.

The basic premise of the game is the same as the film's. The classic Autobots battle between good robots and evil robots has spilled over to planet Earth as the two warring sides search frantically for an artifact known

From there, it's a race for both sides to find Sam and get the AllSpark. There might be more to the movie's plot than what is presented here, and you should really hope there is, because otherwise, we're all in for one exceedingly boring film, there's almost no story to drive the game forward. In some respects that's not surprising, simply because with this method, almost none of the film is spoiled for you.

On the flipside, the Decepticons campaign has you playing as Megatron, Starscream, Barricade, and company to track down the AllSpark and destroy the Autobots. While the opportunity to play as both the good and evil sides sounds enticing, you'll actually find that there's very little difference between the two campaigns.

Regardless of which side you pick, you'll be forced to slog through a copious number of missions that have you fighting easy-to-kill grunt Autobots using the same three-hit combo again and again, or racing around one of the game's few, somewhat open-ended environments trying to chase down one Autobot or Decepticon to fight a few times while using the same three-hit combo, as well as an occasional throw attack.

These missions might have been more tolerable if the combat were a little more involved, but as it stands, you just need to mash on the melee attack button to blow through most enemies, and the few that aren't so easy just require a random object from the environment thrown at them to soften them up.

The lone bright spot comes from the Decepticons campaign. In certain missions, you're tasked with simply laying waste to one environment or another. Be it a big city or a sprawling military installation, these environments are fun to destroy. Your weapons fire does a lot of damage to buildings, cars, trees, and any other solid objects nearby.

In the Autobots campaign, you can do the same types of damage, but it's all incidental, since you're ultimately trying to protect humanity--not lay waste to it. On the Decepticons side, your goal is to cause as much chaos as you can, and that can be a good bit of fun. What's neat is the way the destruction and battles are presented--explosions are frequent and large, the damage to buildings looks appropriately massive, and the combat moves you can pull off actually do look cool.