I was a bit bored today so I checked out Transformers, The Game. I played a grand total of about 3 minutes of it before I threw my hands up and uninstalled.
If you’re going to buy this game, don’t. If you’re going to warez this game, don’t.
Things that were wrong:
- An obvious conversion from a console game, meaning that all the menus had overlay text of “Press ENTER to select. Press backspace to go back.”. They had to have this because there wasn’t any mouse control in the menus. I haven’t had a game without mouse control in the menus since the days of Doom.
- It would detect a joypad about every 10 seconds while I was in the menus (possibly my joystick) and ask me to hit a button on the device. Very annoying.
- Default mouselook was wrong… I’d assume you could go into the controls menu and change it, but when I went into the controls menu, my controls stopped working, and I had to alt-tab out of the game and end the process.
- Graphics were ‘meh’.
- Gameplay was obvious in it’s console heritage, with simplistic, small maps (the two I saw) and boring play.
- Game menus sucked due to aforementioned console heritage.
- This was the biggest for me… Every time the game was started you have to sit through the logos for activision, Travellers Tales, Hasbro, Paramount, then two pages of trademarks and copyright for helicopters and vehicles. Every time. I figure it was about a minute and a half of material, which is fine once, heck, I put up with the logos at the start of BF2142 and BF2 each time it starts up, but it’s one, maybe two logos and maybe 20 seconds of time. It bugs me even more that the game doesn’t seem to use this time to load the menus or game maps or anything because after you sit through them (no keypress will shortcut this it appears), then things still have to load up for the menus.
So to the Transformers franchise I say “great movie, keep at it, stay out of the bad game rip offs”.