Transformers - Revenge of the Fallen

By 2009 the PS2 was a machine publishers served out of obligation, and the split-development movie tie-in was the standard way to do it. While the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 got Luxoflux's open-city version of Revenge of the Fallen, PS2 owners received something smaller and more contained: a mission-driven action game built around compact arenas, objective markers and a steady stream of Decepticon fodder. It is a different game wearing the same poster.

The transformation button carries the whole design. On foot you get melee combos, ranged fire and a lock-on that does most of the aiming for you; in vehicle mode you get speed, ramming and the ability to cross a map before the next wave spawns. The best moments come from flicking between the two mid-fight, breaking a melee exchange to peel away as a car and come back with momentum. The worst come when the camera cannot decide where to sit in a narrow street, which happens often.

Structurally it alternates Autobot and Decepticon campaigns, which is the smartest thing about it. Playing as Starscream or Megatron is not just a palette swap on the same objectives; the Decepticon missions lean toward destruction quotas and pursuit, and that tonal difference does more for variety than any of the unlockables. Boss encounters are pattern-learning affairs, telegraphed and repetitive, but they at least give the scale of the robots somewhere to go.

What holds it back is the same thing that held back most late-cycle licensed work on the hardware. Environments are grey and reused, enemy variety runs thin by the halfway point, and the frame rate sags whenever too much is happening at once, which is precisely when you need it steady. The audio does better than it should, with movie-accurate weapon and transformation sounds doing real work to sell the fantasy the visuals cannot.

As a curiosity it earns its place: a snapshot of how the industry handled two audiences on two generations of hardware at once, and proof that the smaller version was not always the lazier one. Nobody will mistake it for the film's spectacle, but there is an honest, blunt action game under the licence, and it knows better than to overstay.