Ah, the sweet smell of nostalgia. There have been a ton of toy remakes and re-issues that are starting to make a second go around that originally came out back when I was a kid. Since I now have two younger ones myself, I have quickly seen my house get strewn with a litter of Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, and older Transformer re-makes stuff. Honestly, Transformers never really died out, it just went in so many different directions over the past 10 or so years that the original toys that I used to play with were a thing of the past. Well, since Hasbro has made the decision to start re-issuing the original series once more both in the stores and on TV, Atari apparently decided to jump on in on the fun and release Transformers for the PS2. While it’s not a perfect game, it is fun and I had a good time walking down memory lane a bit in the process.

Transformers follows the story of heroic Autobots Optimus Prime, Red Alert, and Hot Shot (all of which are playable characters in the game) as they search through various locales here on earth to try and find a group of mini cons that fled their home planet to avoid enslavement by the evil Decepticons. The leader of the Decepticons (Megatron) has assembled an army of Decepticlones and has arrived here on earth to hunt down and enslave the mini cons to help him wipe out the Autobots once and for all, and you guide your playable character (or characters) through the areas fighting hordes of enemy Decepticlones and tangling with some famous old school Decepticons like Starscream, Cyclonus, and of course Megatron himself.

Transformers is a 3^rd person action shooter, and the gameplay overall is pretty much what you would expect from this kind of title. The left analog stick moves the character around, the right stick aims, and there is a jump button and one button for your basic weapon (or melee if a bad guy gets too close), which is a blaster. As you go through the stages finding mini cons, you can actually attach them to your character in one of the four shoulder button slots to help you out. The attachable mini cons will boost one of three areas which are attack (rockets, homing missiles, blaster upgrade, etc), defense (deflector shields, etc), or enhancements (infrared vision, sniper scope, etc) which help to give you an advantage over the swarms of enemies that you will have to battle along the way. Of course being Transformers, you can also hit the triangle button on the fly to convert from robot into vehicle depending on which character you are playing with at the time.

A couple of additional gameplay controls that they added in that I thought were kinda cool were a recon mode and the use of mini con partners to actually help enhance your chances, which I’ll explain here in a sec. The recon mode allows you to enter more of an FPS viewpoint and zoom in (it’s also where the sniper scope attachment comes in when you get it) to help hit enemies from a distance or just scope out the area to see what you are heading for. The mini con partner can be attached in order to slow down the action which helps dodge bullets or line up shots if you happen to get into a mess, but it has to be used sparingly since attaching the mini partner will eat up energy … and when the energy hits 0 it is of course over. Well, at least until you restart anyways.

On a positive note, I have to say that up front I was really impressed with the open ended level design that they put into the game. While each area has set mission objectives to accomplish, the environments that you go through don’t really have a ton of set “point A to point B” boundaries which allows you to really go out and explore on your own. For example, the first stage was in the Amazon, and rather then just head down the visible pathway, I was often off in the trees or running through streams looking for hidden mini cons or data cons (data cons are collectibles that allow you to open up things like concept art, production photos and info, comics, and even old TV spots from the 80’s). Eventually you of course get where you want to be or need to be, but it really makes it a lot more enjoyable to play.

Secondly, I thought that it was a great idea to have a large variety of mini cons to mess around with (over 40 that act as attachments rather than partners), and it really helps in trying to plan out the best strategy for different scenarios that you may find yourself in from time to time. For example, the sniper scope can come in handy in stages where you have wide open spaces, but may not be the best idea if you’re in thick trees or something. You will come across warp gate areas in each stage which not only act as save points, but will also take you back to home base which can allow you to make some tweaks and adjustments on mini con attachments as you see fit to do, which helped me out a lot if I felt that I didn’t have the right equipment for the job.

Now, wherever you find good stuff there’s got to be some not so good stuff too, and unfortunately there are some down points in this title as well.  For starters, the mini con attachment thing was a great idea, but I really didn’t think it was as open as it could have been. Each one fits into a particular L or R button, so you can’t really do a full equip like you may want to do. Basically, say you are playing with Red Alert who has a high defense so you want to equip both cluster rockets and homing missiles to help boost his attack. Since both of those mini cons only fit into the L2 slot, you have to select between one or the other which not only causes you to lose an opportunity for extra attack, but I almost always (regardless of the character) wound up having one of the L or R buttons go pretty much unused which seems like a waste of an upgrade slot.

Secondly, I didn’t think they did as much with the whole Transformer aspect as they really could have done. Changing into a vehicle normally was done simply to help get around a little faster (although it was needed in some places to jump ravines and whatnot), but if you’re OK just taking your time and exploring there just really wasn’t much of a need to switch around in most cases. I really would have liked to see more emphasis on creating some areas where it was a primary focus of the game rather than something that you could just do if you felt the need to do so.

Lastly, and unfortunately the big area that a lot of games fall prey to is of course the whole aspect of repetition. Each area may offer up some new zones, missions or enemies, but ultimately it’s all the same thing over and over again. Go into an area, find as many mini and data cons as possible, kill enemies, complete the objective, beat the boss, move to the next stage and do it all over again. To its credit, the action pretty intense in some places and it will keep your attention, but after a while it just loses its spark since you know exactly what to expect moving forwards. Also, it would have helped a lot to have a 2 player mode where one person could be good or bad and vice versa, but single player is about all there is to it.

Overall Transformers isn’t perfect, but honestly it is fun for a while. Fans of the toys (from now or from back in the day) will have a good time with it for a while, but there probably isn’t a whole lot of reason to go back and do it all over again unless you want to try and get all the movies and unlockable stuff that you may have missed the first time through. While this may be a good addition to the libraries of games for some of you, I’d probably recommend a rental prior to making the final decision to go out and buy it.

Gameplay: 7.3
The controls are pretty easy to pick up and get into, and the ability to do a recon mode or use a mini con partner to slow down the action were neat. Also on the mini con note, having a bunch to choose from to upgrade was a good idea, and allowed a little more player interaction into setting things up the way that they want. Unfortunately, the action (while decent) gets repetitive, the lack of being able to really fully customize your character may cause a waste of a shoulder button, and the lack of vehicle specific stages or focus really hurt in the long run in my opinion.

Graphics: 7.6
The graphics were pretty good overall, and the cut scenes were neat. Stages had some decent lighting and shadow effects on trees, objects or water, and the playable characters had some good detail done to them too and were animated well. The enemies were a little duller looking overall though, and there were some stages that seemed bland despite a few scattered things here and there.

Sound: 7.4
The music is there more for background noise, but it will get a little more intense and loud as the action picks up and gets going. The battle noises and explosions sounded pretty neat overall, and there of course is that cool shifting noise whenever you convert your character from robot to vehicle and back again.

Difficulty: Medium
There are three different difficulty settings to choose from, so you can select based on what you feel comfortable with. Even as it gets more difficult, the mini con partner helps out and there are usually a ton of health drops on killed bad guys to help keep you replenished.

Concept: 7.3
While it’s not perfect, I liked it a lot better than Beast Wars or some of the other Transformers titles that have hit store shelves over the years. I really think that this could have been great if there were some of the additions made that I discussed earlier on in the review.

Overall: 7.4
Transformers is a decent title that proves to be fun for a while. Unfortunately, it does get repetitive and there probably won’t be much replayability for most of you out there, so if you are thinking about buying it I would definitely suggest trying it out at the rental store whether you are a fan of the series or not.