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IGN Review of Transformers: Dark of the Moon
The root of most movie tie-in games' problems: time. Too-short development cycles, last-minute plot changes (realistic for shooting schedules, but murder for level design and game pacing)... the list goes on. And time feels like it's at the root of all of Transformers: Dark of the Moon's problems. Too much time spent waiting for things to happen. Too much time doing the same things over and over. Too little time spent as a robot-out-of-disguise. And not enough time to beat (or even meet) expectations as the follow-up to the best Transformers game ever, last year's Transformers: War for Cybertron.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon carries over much of what made War for Cybertron great. A hybrid of third-person shooter and vehicle combat, the game allows you to shift between vehicle and robot form at will, and each Transformer has its own particular abilities and strengths. While the ability to pick up new weapons is gone, each character has distinctive tools of destruction that are typically pretty interesting to use.
Some significant mechanical changes rear their heads, too -- vehicle mode now defaults to Stealth Force, where you have so many weapons, your Transformers is literally splitting at the seams (no, really -- guns poke out of every orifice). It seems like a cool idea, and it is... until you realize that this is the first of several small changes that drastically alter the way the game plays. The thing is, in Stealth Force mode, your character can take much more punishment than he can in robot form -- a 180 from War for Cybertron. The weapons you carry in robot form have to be reloaded all the time, but your Stealth Force cannons come equipped with endless piles of ammunition. Put simply, you rarely have much reason to run around in robot form. Everything you can do on legs, you can do more effectively on wheels (or hoverpads, or whatever).
This creates a strange dynamic where you wind up staying in vehicle form until the last moment possible, then shifting to robot and back. The alternative is to die unexpectedly from a sudden wave of enemies tossing grenades and firing balls of death in your general direction. And on normal difficulty and above, you will die. In robot form, you're downright fragile, but even in Stealth Force mode, you're likely to find yourself overwhelmed with few points of cover to duck behind.
This is partly due to level design that feels sparse at the best of times; Transformers: Dark of the Moon usually feels like taffy stretched too far. The giant, expansive journey through War for Cybertron's alien world is replaced by small levels whose playtime is artificially expanded by the "survive multiple waves of bad guys in a locked room" motif. Some of the levels showcase interesting ideas, and certain outdoor locations show off some really fantastic lighting and color, but moments of inspired design are few. Even the parts that involve travel over large areas are surrounded by cliff faces or giant concrete walls or... you get the idea.
War for Cybertron fans will be disappointed to learn that the three-player cooperative play and Escalation survival modes haven't returned in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but things are saved somewhat by the returning competitive multiplayer mode. Once again, developer High Moon Studios brings a unique online experience to bear -- the ability to transform adds mobility and strategic options that other multiplayer shooters can't reasonably replicate. But some of the campaign's basic problems persist in multiplayer, particularly the robot/Stealth-Force/vehicle trinity. The nature of firefights has changed, and I'm not sure it's for the better. It's still fun, but the removal of support classes and enhanced durability of vehicles eliminates some of the lightning-fast back-and-forth inherent in War for Cybertron's team deathmatch and conquest modes. It also removes some of the fun.
©2011-06-15, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Transformers: Dark of the Moon carries over much of what made War for Cybertron great. A hybrid of third-person shooter and vehicle combat, the game allows you to shift between vehicle and robot form at will, and each Transformer has its own particular abilities and strengths. While the ability to pick up new weapons is gone, each character has distinctive tools of destruction that are typically pretty interesting to use.
Some significant mechanical changes rear their heads, too -- vehicle mode now defaults to Stealth Force, where you have so many weapons, your Transformers is literally splitting at the seams (no, really -- guns poke out of every orifice). It seems like a cool idea, and it is... until you realize that this is the first of several small changes that drastically alter the way the game plays. The thing is, in Stealth Force mode, your character can take much more punishment than he can in robot form -- a 180 from War for Cybertron. The weapons you carry in robot form have to be reloaded all the time, but your Stealth Force cannons come equipped with endless piles of ammunition. Put simply, you rarely have much reason to run around in robot form. Everything you can do on legs, you can do more effectively on wheels (or hoverpads, or whatever).
This creates a strange dynamic where you wind up staying in vehicle form until the last moment possible, then shifting to robot and back. The alternative is to die unexpectedly from a sudden wave of enemies tossing grenades and firing balls of death in your general direction. And on normal difficulty and above, you will die. In robot form, you're downright fragile, but even in Stealth Force mode, you're likely to find yourself overwhelmed with few points of cover to duck behind.
This is partly due to level design that feels sparse at the best of times; Transformers: Dark of the Moon usually feels like taffy stretched too far. The giant, expansive journey through War for Cybertron's alien world is replaced by small levels whose playtime is artificially expanded by the "survive multiple waves of bad guys in a locked room" motif. Some of the levels showcase interesting ideas, and certain outdoor locations show off some really fantastic lighting and color, but moments of inspired design are few. Even the parts that involve travel over large areas are surrounded by cliff faces or giant concrete walls or... you get the idea.
War for Cybertron fans will be disappointed to learn that the three-player cooperative play and Escalation survival modes haven't returned in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, but things are saved somewhat by the returning competitive multiplayer mode. Once again, developer High Moon Studios brings a unique online experience to bear -- the ability to transform adds mobility and strategic options that other multiplayer shooters can't reasonably replicate. But some of the campaign's basic problems persist in multiplayer, particularly the robot/Stealth-Force/vehicle trinity. The nature of firefights has changed, and I'm not sure it's for the better. It's still fun, but the removal of support classes and enhanced durability of vehicles eliminates some of the lightning-fast back-and-forth inherent in War for Cybertron's team deathmatch and conquest modes. It also removes some of the fun.
©2011-06-15, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved