The Story
After the events of the last film, the Autobots have taken it upon themselves to help the human race by performing secret missions to keep the peace of the world. During one of these missions, they stumble upon a few Decepticons doing something very naughty. In standard fare, Optimus and his Autobots rally up to stop whatever is planned. Along the way, they begin to uncover the secret plot of Megatron and the horrors he has planned for the film.
Yes, this is somewhat a prequel to the feature film and you play all the events mentioned briefly in the film.
Hated
When you pick up a shooter, be it first person or third person, one would expect a controller scheme that is either customizable or at least similar to every other game in the genre we are use to. Apparently someone over at High Moon thought it would be a good idea to swap them every time you change form. In a game called Transformers, how could that go wrong? It's not like we'd swap every couple minutes or anything. Right?
Anyways, the basic firing controls in robot form consist of the left trigger to zoom and the right trigger to shoot. The left and right bumpers being used to fire off special attacks and abilities. Not to out of the norm. But then when you change into "stealth" (vehicle) form, the left trigger is used to drive and the left bumper is to zoom in. Almost every time I swapped I'd get frustrated because I'd have to transform my hands so I wouldn't waste my specials. It was even worse when you were in the middle of a boss battle and needed to swap multiple times and use the special attack at a precise moment. You all should have chosen one scheme and left it that way, or at least let us remap the controller.
Speaking of bosses, it was like they planned the last three of the seven first and then decided to just fake the others. I am not kidding when I saw I beat the first four by staying in vehicle form, firing my grenades while locked on and slowly veered left or right. It was like the AI was okay with standing in one spot and forgot how to lead a target when firing. Granted the last three, I'll expand more below, made up for these fights but it was a horrible way to start and continue the pace of the game.
Liked
Now while most film based games try to somehow link the film and game in some forced way. Transformers is no exception except for the fact that the forced nature blended well with the story of the film. The film leaves a few things to the imagination in the lines of the build up at the beginning. Dark Of The Moon fills in that blank in the story. In fact, the game ends exactly where the film picks up in the story. At least to some degree without spoiling the twists and turns of the film. But it is interesting to see where it all began.
As I mentioned above the boss fights were quite boring and/or easy. Outside of the last three. Particularly the Starscream vs. Stratosphere fight. This was a fight that required you to play in your vehicle form the entire time as it was aerial combat. It was like a scene from Top Gun with Transformers. But only slightly less cool than the fight between Optimus and Shockwave, which also seemed to be the only fight that required tactics and good timing.
Overview
All in all, I'd have to say that Transformers: Dark Of The Moon is worth a play. Is it worth a buy? To the diehard Transformers fan it should be. For everyone else? Only if you like padding your gaming collection with game you will play once or twice and then never touch again.
Don't get me wrong. I am by no means saying that T:DotM is a horrible game. It is worth a good rent at least if you plan on seeing the film, but as far as a buy I think you'd be heading down to trade it in within a month. It just lacked the replayablity to me. I'm also not a diehard Transformers fan-boy even though I enjoyed the new films and the games to date.
Transformers: Dark Of The Moon was developed by High Moon Studios and Published by Activision on June 14th 2011 for the PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, DS and 3DS. A PS3 copy of the game was provided by the publisher for review purposes.
