Publisher: Activision
Developer: Krome Studios
ESRB Rating: Teen
Release Date: June 23, 2009

    As opposed to the first Transformers movie game, for the second time around the powers that be decided that it would be best to create two entirely different Transformers games for the "main" consoles, with one targeted at the two with the greater graphical capability and one targeted at those with "last-gen" graphics-- i.e., the Sony Playstation 2 and the Nintendo Wii. So surprisingly enough, the PS2/Wii game bears pretty much no resemblance to the PS3/360 version.
    Before I start the review, there are a few things worth noting. For one, I have a PS2 and not a Wii, so I can't comment on how well the controls for this game work on the Wii-- the score below reflects my experience with the game using the PS2's controls. I also don't have a second PS2 controller, so I can't comment on the multiplayer aspect of the game. (There is apparently an "arena" battle versus mode as well as cooperative play where another player can jump in and basically assist the first player with an additional targeting reticle/gun.) However, the multiplayer parts are not online and are a "side attraction" for this game and not the main event, so I still think that my score adequately reflects the quality of this game overall.
    If you've read pretty much any other review of this game, you'll notice that the critics are slamming it. Hard. And in some respects, I have to admit that the slamming is deserved. For one-- and this is my biggest beef with the game-- it is EXTREMELY short. You can beat the entire campaign in 3-4 hours, and that's assuming you die a few times a level. There are some incentives to play through it a second time (I'll get to that later), but even including that it's still waaaay shorter than your average game in the shooter/brawler genre. You also play as relatively few characters-- 4 Autobots (Bumblebee, Optimus Prime, Ironhide, and Jetfire) and 3 Decepticons (Megatron, Starscream, and Sideways).
    Another big hit that the game deserves comes with the graphics. Even for the PS2/Wii systems, the graphics are horrible. The water is solid-looking, the textures are extraordinarily dull and low-res, and the characters have a rather low poly count. Even for a "rushed" movie game, graphics this bad are inexcusable.
    However, if you can look beyond those two admittedly big caveats, what you'll find is a surprisingly fun game. Most of the levels have your Autobot (or Decepticon, there's one story campaign that allows you control of both sides at different points) going through linear levels with a fixed camera, shooting or punching Decepticon drones into oblivion. You have a targeting reticle that can lock onto nearby opponents, which helps immensely with aiming, and there are several combo moves you can do on your opponents. It's shallow, but fun, and often the level designs are quite good, particularly one level that takes place in a Russian dam facility. In addition, you get Energon from defeated opponents, which you can use either to replenish your health, temporarily strengthen your attacks, or do a "super move" which involves your character transforming in the process and doing a powerful area-effect attack. (Some are pretty cool to watch-- I especially love Megatron's super move, where he SLAMS the ground hard, making all nearby enemies fly into the air a bit, and then in slow motion he transforms into tank mode and fires his cannon in a complete circle, hitting everyone as they come back down to the ground.) It's a pretty creative setup-- do you use your energy to replace those hits you lost, or to make yourself temporarily more powerful and dispose of the droves of enemies heading your way? This comes into play even moreso in Hard mode, where the enemies deal considerably more damage and thus your Energon has to be "rationed" even moreso.
    Still, just level after level of this, even in different environments, could get old fairly quick. However, for the most part just when you're about tired of the "main" gameplay style, the game will throw something else at you. You've got linear "on rails" Starscream-flying levels, which are somewhat similar but you can't control your speed, and you transform to fire at enemies behind you. You've also got one Sideways "driving" level-- this is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the game and is great fun to play (which is why it's such a shame that it's only one level). You drive like a normal racing game, but Bumblebee and other Autobots occasionally catch up and get in front of you, transforming and firing at you. You have to be extremely dexterious to not die from both their firepower and crashing into other cars on the freeway, so instead you're given the option to transform and fire back-- however, when you activate the transform button everything moves into slow motion, so you're still skidding down the freeway on your feet as you fire at the Autobots attacking you before you transform back into car mode and things go back to normal speed. It's very cinematic. You've also got one Optimus Prime "freefall" level at the beginning of the game, where you're dropped into Shanghai from a very high elevation (much higher than in the movie) and have dodge incoming missile barrages while shooting at Decepticon enemies that fly down in front of you. And finally, in two different levels you're interrupted now and then with a "hacking" puzzle minigame that's actually quite clever. In this game, you're supposed to move mirrors around to deflect a laser from a red sensor to a green sensor. However, it's not as simple as just positioning the mirrors to direct the beam the green sensor-- if at any time the laser is not hitting EITHER of the sensors, an alarm will go off and you'll have to start over. So you have to not only set up mirrors to get the laser to the green sensor, you have to do it while still keeping the beam hitting the red sensor until you've got it to the point where you can switch the beam over to the green sensor in just one move. It can get quite difficult in the later levels.

    The boss battles, for the most part, are also fairly fun to play. Versing Megatron as Optimus Prime is a tiresome, overly long out-and-out brawl where you have to almost be psychic to block Megs' attacks, but the others are at least okay, if not out-and-out great. Demolishor slams his fists and wheel at you almost constantly, forcing you to hit a few exposed weak points at the right time and then doing some button-press cinematics to disable him one part at a time. Versing Optimus Prime as Megatron later is a brawler, but at first it gains a bit of strategy as a laser security system comes on and you have to lure Prime into the stun beam while avoiding it yourself and then going up and smacking him around. The final battle against the Fallen has three distinct stages and makes liberal use of the Fallen's portal-making ability to fairly good effect while pretty much forbidding you from taking the Fallen on directly until the end due to his sheer power. Oh, and the Devastator boss fight? Fan-TASTIC. It takes place across an entire level (that's also quite large), and the dude takes quite a bit of damage. Stabbing him in the face, avoiding his sucking vortex, hurling energy canisters into his maw and then detonating them, dropping pillars on him-- even though it's a long boss fight, they keep changing it up enough so that it doesn't get old.
    The storyline for the game uses many of the same elements of the Revenge of the Fallen movie-- Devastator, the pyramids, the Fallen, Jetfire, etcetera-- but it combines them all in different ways for, oddly enough, an almost completely different storyline. Only the ending and the beginning are the same. Instead you'll get stuff like a plot involving the kidnapping of Bumblebee, and Optimus fighting Devastator in Shanghai instead of Egypt. In some ways it's confusing why the game turned out this way, but I actually think I prefer it like this. Now, you're not entirely certain how the story's going to go even if you've already seen the movie, and the story itself is quite solid on its own. In fact, out of all the Revenge of the Fallen games, I'd say the story in this one is by far the most fleshed-out and detailed, with some of the cutscenes being surprisingly lengthy.
    There are a few bugs in the game, however, as you'd expect from a semi-rushed movie game. None of them are game-breaking, to be sure, but it is worth nothing that the collision detection can occasionally be a little off-- once I fell right through the floor in a level to my death, and once as I was fighting Optimus Prime with Megatron he got stuck in the floor which allowed me to finish him off really easily. Additionally, twice during my playthrough the next section of a level actually failed to load for some odd reason, so the level just suddenly stopped at one point and continuing forward let me to fall to oblivion, though when the level rebooted and I walked away and came back again the section loaded properly.
    The game gives you some incentives to replay through levels, though again, the game is so short that even with these incentives you'll still be done with it fairly quickly. There are Autobot/Decepticon symbols hidden throughout the levels for you to find, and when you run over them they'll unlock a piece of concept art or a model for you to look at in the main menus. You also can unlock the same "Ultimate Doom" 3-parter G1 episode that's available in the PS3/360 version of the game, though the quality doesn't seem as good, at least on my copy. Some of these symbols are REALLY hard to find, though, especially given the fixed camera angle-- despite my best efforts, I still haven't been able to find them all. I'm not sure where the heck the 7 or so I'm missing are, but I wish there was some sort of cheat you could unlock after you beat the game that would make the controller vibrate when you're near one, for example. In addition to the hidden unlockables, there are also several "Feats" that you can accomplish throughout the game, which are similar to achievements/trophies for the PS3/360 version. They range from "Beat the game on Hard mode" to "Perform 25 stun attacks" to "Complete the Sideways racing level without hitting another car"-- stuff like that. You don't get anything for completing all the Feats, but it is something else to try to do, at least.

    Overall, though I'd hardly consider the PS2/Wii version of the Revenge of the Fallen game something to crow about, it's not nearly as bad as the reviews make it out to be, and in most cases is quite fun. The low-res graphics and the extremely short campaign are two big strikes against it, but honestly it's a decent effort. I wouldn't recommend it for full-price, but on clearance/discount it's worth a pickup.

Graphics: 3/10
Music: 9/10
Gameplay: 14/20
Storyline: 10/10
Level Design: 9/10
Cutscenes: 9/10
Controls: 15/20
Replayability: 4/10

Overall Rating:73/100 Good

(Screencaps taken from Gamespot.com)

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