Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

Aaron and Zulhelmi’s review for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has been published on the New Era web site (the print version should be in this month’s Gamers’ Choice magazine). Link here.

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AARON KRISH & Muhammad Zulhelmi Bin Zainal

Temasek Polytechnic / Temasek Informatics & IT School – Game & Entertainment Technology

Revenge of the Fallen features two faction campaigns; the benevolent Autobots, and the deadly Decepticons. This third person shooter expands beyond the movie plot with bonus missions and characters. Unlike the first Transformers game, Revenge of the Fallen allows the player to select which missions they would like to accomplish and in any order.

In the Autobots campaign, the player starts off as Bumblebee, starting with a tutorial of the controls and capabilities of playing as a Transformer, while the Decepticons play their tutorial as Sideway. Every Cybertronian has two modes: a vehicle mode which allows players to transform into their vehicles to move faster, and weapon mode which the Transformer unsheathes their firearms to access their primary and secondary weapons. They each also have unique offensive or defensive abilities for more strategic battle tactics. For example Ratchet/Long Haul provides their team with accelerated healing for added survivability.

The game awards players with points for advanced techniques like taking down an enemy that is climbing a building, scoring a headshot or even timing a transformation just right so that the momentum of your car mode transfers into a robot attack. Using these techniques builds up the player’s Overdrive meter. Once it is full, Overdrive mode can be activated, which grants temporary invulnerability, increased damage and disables weapon overheating. This allows the robot to clear large groups of enemies easily.

Each mission has the main objective and two other bonus objectives, and completing each provides players with a hefty amount of energon (The in-game currency). These energons are used to buy upgrades which enhance the abilities of the faction. This in turn makes players stronger and last longer in combat. The missions mostly focus on specific objectives like escort/protect targets, searching for a goal and destroying targets.

The bulk of the gameplay focuses on combat and that’s not a bad thing as the combat is quite exhilarating once you’ve mastered the art of transforming. Speeding around in your vehicle mode at top speed and morphing into your weapon mode, then immediately blasting away when you encounter enemies is a fun experience.

The challenge level isn’t too high once you’ve got the hang of the controls although trying to get Platinum status on every mission will take a number of tries. That, plus the multiple missions and two factions means that there’s quite an amount of replayability.

As far as graphics goes, the level of detail on each Transformer is great. You can see the outstanding parts of each robot character and how they fit onto their vehicle modes. However the enemies you’re facing are slightly more generic, with a car, helicopter and truck Transformer making up the bulk of the opposition. The sound is standard here too, except that the voice acting for Starscream is rather distorted that it would have been useful if subtitles were provided.

Overall, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen comes off as a unique 3rd person shooter game that stands out from the rest due to its innovative design and gameplay.