“Now, that’s a car” – Transformers: The Game

**Transformers: The Game** (Tt Games/Activision, PS2, 2007)

There is a central freedom to Grand Theft Auto which helped power its success and got picked up by so many of its successors. Move around a city, see a car, and all you have to do is press the triangle button to immediately start driving it. It’s a moment of transformation that the games use again and again. In the original Grand Theft Auto, it went further still, as I noted when I played it: your character is “a human car in potentio, waiting to be let loose”. What if that was more literal still?

In Transformers: The Game, you can unleash the toys’ central gimmick, the series’s central force, with a press of a button. Inevitably, it is the triangle button. Press that and your bipedal robot immediately transforms into a car, or truck, or helicopter. All the other controls switch around to suit. That one moment is smooth and fun and kind of brilliant, and it’s easy to see it acting as the selling point for the game.

Of course, there is rather a lot more to Grand Theft Auto than that moment. The freedom to move around and transform is accompanied by a range of things to do with it. That was where an increasing number of games were headed. And that’s where things go wrong for Transformers. Even when it lets you move around its locations, they are big and empty and pointless. It’s reduced to collectibles as a reason for exploration, but really provides very little thrill of discovery or reason not to shortcut to completing its tasks as quickly as possible.

Things don’t get any better there. The car controls are an oversteering mess, with an approach well-illustrated by controls screen labelling the square button as reverse but nothing as brake, because hey, why would you want that? Tt Games’s Lego Star Wars pedigree comes through most clearly in that the world this takes place in seems to be made of lego, with bridge sections bouncing away with all the weight of hollow plastic as you give them a passing tap.

Combat, meanwhile, is even more basic and repetitive than Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, with your long range weapons mostly rendered pointless by shields. Although given that the targeting is unreliable and the controls unresponsive at best, that’s not all bad. Instead of any inherent challenge to the combat, difficulty largely comes through absurd time limits, which act as further disincentive to look around anywhere. The resultant level of frustration is unmatched since Enter the Matrix, which at least felt ambitious but unfinished.

Still, complete some of the destruction and combat-based challenges and you will be rewarded by a whole load of cutscenes unevenly bringing in bits of the movie more directly. I was a fan of Transformers as a child, especially the animated film, but didn’t take any interest in the reboot. Even if I had done, I think it would take rather a lot of interest for me not to feel like I can live without this particular piece of junk.