Being a little kid in the 80's and early 90's was great. No, actually, it was better than great - it was ideal. We were too young at the time to have embarrassing photos taken of us wearing a green and purple rhombus pattern shoulder padded jacket with a blonde spikey mullet hairdo that would surely conveniently resurface at some family gathering down the track, but not so young that we couldn't enjoy the best thing about the 80's - the cartoons and related action figures and, if you're like me, your favourite choice for both of those was Transformers (and not My Little Pony, honest).

For those of us who grew up on Transformers, 2007 marks the year Hollywood finally catches up with our beloved childhood obsession (or maybe it's us, the original fans, who finally got old enough to directly shake money out of?) with Transformers: The Movie, and as we all know by now, wherever there is money to be made in blockbuster action movies, there is money to be made in not-so-blockbuster action videogames. Hence from the folks at Activision comes Transformers: The Game, and although it is playable, anyone looking for serious gaming need not apply.

Like a lot of movie based games these days, if you want the best experience out of this one, you should probably see the movie first and not the other way around because, while the storyline here is reasonably condensed, there is enough going on that it would act as a spoiler. At the same time though, the game definitely suffers from very rushed execution of the storyline, often creating confusion as to why you are doing the things you are doing - basically, when you play Transformers: The Game, you just listen to what your next mission is, and do it without thinking too much. This is not a huge surprise as movie games often fall well short of a beefy storyline so they don't intrude on the movie's territory, but in this case, just a little bit more attention to limit the disjointed feel would have been nice.

If you look carefully at the retail box, one of the first things you'll notice about this game is the complete lack of Xbox Live support or even two player support, which means Transformers: The Game  is all about its single player campaign mode, which is split up into two sections - yep, you guess it, Autobots and Decepticons. Each have their own campaign to play through, and while some levels are shared between the two, the bulk of each campaign has its own levels to play in. These levels range from suburbia and city CBD to US army bases, and are all reasonably big - certainly big enough to enjoy the game's ability to transform and roam about in either of your Transformer's two forms, which you can do pretty much at any time in the game on demand.

Being the goodie goodie that I am, I opted to play the Autobot campaign first. Unfortunately, what ensued was severely disappointing gaming. Given the Autobots are kind hearted, mostly ground based vehicle transformers, most missions seemed to involve driving around after Decepticons with an extremely lacking driving model, while battling randoms and being penalized for creating too much destruction in the surroundings, which are more or less fully destructible by the way, from buildings collapsing to smaller objects like cars and lamp posts available for use during combat. And despite the fact I was a pro-human life Autobot, the police force and army didn't seem to care, as they had no reservations opening fire on me while happily ignoring the hordes of Decepticons creating more damage than myself.

And things only really go down from there. Throughout the whole Autobot campaign, the amount of variation found in mission types is pitiful, as you find yourself doing the same sort of things over and over again, whether it be fighting the exact same type of enemies or doing the same types of missions, or a combination of both. To make matters worse, once you progress past the first few Decepticon enemy types, your major and minor projectile attacks are completely useless against Decepticon baddies as they simply deploy a seemingly infinite shield as soon as you even think about firing on them. This leaves your sole attack to your  hand to hand combo, which gets extremely repetitive in a very short time, and provides little more than button mashing gameplay.

And if you think the combat repetition couldn't get more severe, think again. Once you progress past the first Decepticon enemy types which can be defeated easily, you will start to face enemies which require following a certain pattern to defeat. This is a fine concept for a third person action game such as this one, but what Transformers: The Game fails to do is change these patterns beyond a basic few throughout the entire game. For example, one pattern is the enemy executes an attack that you can't defend (such as swinging a spikey chain, or using a flamethrower) that can only interrupted by throwing an object at them, which opens a window for attack (but still not projectile attacks). Another pattern is you get an enemy down to little health, and he drives or flies off, forcing you to chase after him and do the same thing three or four times around the map before he is finally defeated. These two patterns of enemy combat alone probably make up 90% of the gameplay in the Autobot campaign, and only achieve two things - annoyance, and a synthetic challenge designed to extend the gameplay. It really is not much fun at all.

However, that's the Autobot campaign. The Decepticon campaign is a different matter. Being the bad guys as opposed to the good guys has almost always been more fun in video games, but I don't recall such a discrepancy as seen in this game. Instead of worrying about being penalized for destructing your surroundings, your are encouraged to do so as a Decepticon - in fact, some missions demand it, as the levels you find yourself in are often packed to the ying yang with stuff to blow up. On top of this, most of the Decepticons you get to use are air based Transformers such as Starscream, and flying around is far better than driving around in this game. It is almost a completely different game when playing as the Decepticons, and there is little doubt that these guys are what the game was designed for.