Transformers - The Game

The transformation button is the whole pitch. Hold it while barrelling down a Tranquility side street and Optimus folds into a rig without losing momentum; tap it again and he's upright, skidding, already grabbing a parked sedan to hurl at whatever Decepticon just landed. That instant vehicle-to-robot switch is the one thing this licensed cash-in genuinely gets right, and it carries a surprising amount of the game on its back.

The PS2 build is not the same game that shipped on the newer consoles that year. It is smaller, blockier, and built around compact open hubs rather than sprawling city blocks, with mission markers dotted across a map and a split campaign that lets you run the Autobot side or the Decepticon side. The Decepticon half is the more interesting of the two, mostly because destruction is the objective rather than collateral damage you're scolded for. Starscream flying, Blackout tearing up a military base, Megatron simply walking through a street and flattening it — the game is at its best when it stops pretending to have structure.

Combat is thin. You punch, you throw, you occasionally grapple a larger enemy into a quick-time struggle, and the camera regularly loses track of what it is supposed to be showing you during all of it. Enemy variety runs out well before the campaign does, and the escort and protect objectives that pad the Autobot missions are the usual 2007 tie-in filler. Traveller's Tales knew how to make a toy world feel good to move around in, which is why the traversal holds up better than anything you do once you stop moving.

What saves it from being forgettable is scale. Standing in an intersection as a forty-foot robot, watching traffic scatter and lamp posts fold, still reads correctly — the mass is communicated through animation weight and screen shake rather than fidelity, which is exactly the trick a PS2 had to pull in its final years. Kids who grew up with the toys got the fantasy delivered in the crudest, most direct form available.

It is a short game with one very good idea and a lot of ordinary work built around it. Play an hour of the Decepticon campaign, wreck a city block, and you will have seen the best of what it has to offer — which is more than most film licences of the period could claim.