Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Review

Released on June 29, 2009 on pretty much every platform there is, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a video game recreation of most of the film's plot with liberties taken when necessary.

When it comes to graphics, the kindest word is "terrible", especially for a new game. The highest resolution it allows on my laptop was 1280 x 726 or something like that. This is because the resolutions are terrible and the antialiasing is non-existent. It just seems that they didn't really put many options for resolutions in the game and limited it to very low, medium and very high resolutions. All of this is signs of the developer cutting corners.

There are no real graphics settings either. When turned to high quality, the gamma goes way down so I can barely see anything in the game. Graphical contrast has its fair share of problems as well, making different tones unimpressive and muddy looking.

The actual look of the game is unimpressive, despite a large sense of scale in the environments. This seems natural due to the relative size of the Transformers, but problems rear their ugly head when you take a closer look. The environments are muddy and bland, with repeating textures and image clipping upon close examination. This is yet another example of the game-movie tie-in being rushed out in time for a concurrent release. Will developers ever learn?

Music is quite nice actually, a pleasant surprise. The best thing about it was how it rang true to the film score by Steve Jablonsky. Besides this, there were also orchestrated pieces designed to call to mind the spirit of the film. My favorite part was actually the menu music. Good stuff overall.

Sound effects are sadly disappointing. The only original voice is Optimus, at least as far as I can tell. Sure, the game has some cool explosions and stuff gets destroyed real good, but that isn't anything special in video games today.

Gameplay fixes some obvious faults with the original, like the ability to transform at will. But in vehicle mode you constantly move; you can't stay still which making shooting very hard. I guess baby steps are all that we can expect when it comes to Transformers games.

Even without the problems, the game gets repetitive quickly, as all you do is kill other Transformers. There is some fun to be had in online mode, which allows for the standard deathmatches and other similar options, ripped right out of better games, like Gears of War.

Controls don't fare much better, as the key setups are so ridiculous. They space you primary keys far apart and it's annoying to change them in the menu. They have all of the main keys set too close. It's annoying to change them and not overlap keys that you're already using. The hallmark of the bad control situation. This is as such because if the developers couldn't decide on an efficient control scheme, the game is in trouble right off the bat.

Even if you don't use every control possibility, a game should at least give you the option of switching between lots of control options. Due to the myriad of problems, I am told that using the Xbox 360 Wireless Controller Adaptor is really the only way to play Transformers without control issues.

Overall, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a terrible movie game, not at all worth its price, and expectedly continues the curse of horrible movie-game adaptations. Sometimes I think that fanboys will disappear before we get consistently excellent movie based games.

- jedpaull

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