How can I put this as unequivocally as possible – the Transformers 2 game is as bad as the movie.
Forcing myself to play through this godforsaken abortion of a game was akin to jumping off of my third-story balcony, running up the stairs, doing it again, running up the stairs again, and repeating for ten hours. Where to even start? Well, let's start with the graphics. In short, they look like horseshit, and the fact that they look like horseshit (seriously, I have PS1 games that look better than this) is in no way helped out by the fact that the developers thought it necessary to blanket the entire game in drab darkness and a kind of purple fog. There's an absolute absence of colour, lighting, shading. Now normally, I'm not such a stickler for graphics, but when a game has probably a pretty high budget like this one (although who knows, it's Activision – they could have cut corners all over the place), it's indicative of a cynical culture of gaming development that's all too prevalent.
Part of the problem with the look of the game too boils down to the terrible aesthetics of the movie series, with its hulking super robots made way too complicated for the human eye to properly decipher. So when the game has its terrible graphics engine attempt to process the robots, it just… fails. It's as dingy and grimy as the movie, and that's obviously not a compliment.
You play as both the Autobots and the Decepticons in this game, switching on a dime even in the middle of battles. So at one point, you might be Bumblebee (WHO TALKS IN THIS GAME for whatever fuckity ass reason), and then you might be Sideways, chasing after Bumblebee. So it's disorienting, to say the least. Not to mention the fact that the plot is even more incomprehensible than you remember it being, what with its talk of the AllSpark and the Cube. (Thankfully, though, Shia LaBoeuf and Co. are nowhere to be found in the game. It's all robots all the time.)
The game is a travesty from top to bottom. If you remember my review of Sin and Punishment 2, I was blown away by that game's use of inventive camera angles to frame the action. Transformers 2 also has "inventive" camera angles in a sense, except that whereas S&P2 was on rails, Transformers 2 allows you to move your character more or less wherever you want. That means that your pointer often doesn't actually point at what you want to shoot at, forcing you to run right up to your enemies and punch them in the face if you want to get anything done.
$5 if you can guess how you go about punching said enemies in the face. If you guessed "ineffectual waggling," congratulations! Here's five vigidollars. I think that because I'm the type of person who reads extensively about games before purchasing them, I've not come across too much of the absolute shit that developers on the Wii are all too often content to pump out. Waggling is a term rarely used in my household, as I'd say all of the games I own for the system are waggle-free. Not so with Transformers 2. It's waggle central up in this bitch!
The driving/flying sections are thankfully a little better, in that they're not outright horrible, but the control of the vehicles is… scattershot, to say the least. Cars handle well… jet fighters, not so much. At least they serve to break up the monotony of waggling to punch robots.
The coup de grace in this game, though, is the part that they stole from Bioshock. Wait, what? Yes, you read that correctly – there's an element of this game taken directly from Bioshock. If you've ever played that game, you might think, what good ideas could be transferred from that game to a game about giant transforming robots? The claustrophobic environments? The inventive presentation? The Ayn Rand scholarship?
Nope – all they took was the hacking minigame.
That's right. The hacking minigame is in Transformers 2, albeit in a different form – here, you have to redirect light using mirrors to hit a button and open a door. It's presented like a cheap flash game, and after the first five or ten, get to be really hard. There's an early level that has you doing one of these puzzles on each floor as you ascend up an elevator. So you have to do about four of these puzzles before you can reach the top.
Q: What are people looking for in a giant robot action game?
A: Puzzles.
Games like this are worse than just being bad. They're reprehensible. They trade on a well-known brand to sell a game of horrifying quality to people who potentially don't know any better, and it's games like this that are transforming (pun unintended) unwitting kids into people who will only see the underbelly of gaming. It's worse than just watching a bad movie. When you watch a bad movie (like Transformers), you can just let the badness wash over you and laugh at it. To play through a bad game like this one, though, requires you to be complicit. You're an accessory to bad gaming, and I'm here to stop you. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.