Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen

“It’s better than the first game”. That’s a sentence you’re going to hear a lot during discussions of the latest Transformers movie adaptation. The comment is definitely a fair one but it’s also quite misleading because while Revenge Of The Fallen is definitely better than the previous 2007 effort it still falls way below the standard of anything we’d actually want to play if we weren’t being paid to do so. The saying “damning with faint praise” definitely springs to mind.

How is Revenge Of The Fallen superior to the first game? Well, you can now transform in the middle of a jump and, er, that’s about it. We’re being a little unfair of course. Under the guiding hand of new developers Luxoflux, the sequel is generally more polished, better looking and a slightly more enjoyable playing experience… but only slightly.

Beneath the veil of the Transformers IP - which could make anything seem better than it actually is to kids of a certain generation - this is still the same old formulaic movie tie-in we’ve played a million times before. You watch some cut-scenes that look like test renders for the final film; half-asleep, you follow each A-B objective as it’s spoon fed to you; and you generally just kill a lot of enemies using the same three moves, while a bunch of overpaid Hollywood “stars” rattle through their lines so quickly they must be rushing for the last bus home.

This familiarly lacklustre experience is nothing, however, when compared to the frankly baffling controls that the developer inexplicably saw fit to implement. To transform into a car the player must hold down the right trigger on the 360 pad and release it to instantly transform back into a robot. Which would be fine were it not for the fact that the right trigger is also the accelerator, meaning that whenever we tried to take a corner during chase sequences we instinctively eased off the accelerator and unintentionally transformed back into a robot, losing all the momentum we’d built up.

Worse still, the right trigger is also used to fire automatic weapons while in robot mode. The left trigger is held to aim your weapon, so if you absentmindedly stop aiming before you’ve stopped firing then you’ll accidentally turn into a car and speed off into the distance, right in the middle of a firefight.

This is honestly one of stupidest control schemes we’ve ever used in a game and while we did eventually learn to work around it, we also know that we shouldn’t have to. Why didn’t the developer just use a single digital button for on/off transformations? We can only assume that they had so little fun working on the game that they wanted to pass on their misery to the player.

Still, at least there’s the multiplayer, eh? Another new addition for the sequel and another piece of ammunition for those who’ll blindly defend Revenge Of The Fallen, the online mode does, we’ll admit, seem quite good fun at first. A general deathmatch type game, Transformers online pits robot against car against plane in a huge arena and challenges you to come out with the most kills. Which you’ll do with ease, actually, making this one of the most instantly gratifying online games on 360. Until, that is, the laughter and cries of seven infant voices come crackling through your headset reminding you that you’ve just pasted a bunch of pre-pubescent children. An appropriately shallow victory for a horribly shallow game.