The plot: Robots + enemy = kill!

The body slam isn't found only in professional wrestling.

Campaign mode is the heart of Transformers. There are two campaign modes, Autobot and Decepticon, which each follow a unique perspective in the same narrative (again, loosely based on the film's script). The Autobot campaign begins in the home town of human protagonist Sam Witwicky. As Autobot Bumblebee, you're tasked with finding Sam and protecting him from the invading Decepticons. Sam, of course, knows the whereabouts of a map to the AllSpark, the relic from the Transformers home planet of Cybertron. Since the AllSpark is capable of breathing life into machines, it's prized by both Decepticons, who wish to use it for evil, and by Autobots, who wish to destroy the AllSpark and any potential for future misuse.

The Decepticon campaign begins in the desert of Qatar at a U.S. military base. Assuming the role of Blackout in helicopter form, the first task at hand is to wage an offensive at the base and use the military network to determine the location of Megatron (and hence the AllSpark). Megatron, who crash-landed in the Arctic circle thousands of years ago in his quest for the AllSpark, was until the late 19th century encased in ice. Teenager Sam's great-great-grandfather, the explorer Captain Archibald Witwicky, discovered Megatron and was inadvertently given a map to the AllSpark. And with that, the race is on: the first alien robot to find Sam and the AllSpark will have the power to control the universe. The plot is as simple as they come; Transformers is unlikely to win any awards for innovation in story.

Destroying a gas station is one of the many mindless objectives. Oh, and they're almost all timed.

Campaign mode may be best described as "sandbox lite". It's an open-world game which allows for limited free roaming. Limited, because the levels are small in size. There is, of course, a main quest with missions (referred to as "chapters" in the game). The main plot is advanced by completing these chapters, but there are a number of side quests. Grand theft auto this is not; the side quests are nothing more than timed collect-a-thons and other thoughtless activities. What constitutes stat building in true sandbox games passes for side quests here. Needless to say, there's little motivation to complete any tasks that aren't part of the main story, aside from adding to the Percentage Complete statistic.

Side quests do offer a way to unlock the game's bonus content. "Bonus" is a relative term though, and the unlockable content in Transformers is almost insulting. First, there are videos, which are just trailers for the movie and short videos which are widely available on the Internet. Then, there are the images: over 150 of them. Rather than give us quality images which may have use as desktop wallpaper, the images here are super-low resolution and pixelated. I wouldn't use one of these images as a forum avatar. Two Cybertron levels - one each for both the Autobot and Decepticon campaigns – are short enough to be completed in just a few minutes. The only saving grace for the bonus content are a handful of unlockable Generation One (G1) Transformers models and skins. Switching a G1 model or skin on will replace all instances of that model in-game with its G1 counterpart. Neat, but not all that bonus-worthy.

A typical side quest, which are typically boring.

Completing the campaign chapters is rarely satisfying. There's little variety among the mission goals – it's either a timed point-to-point chase sequence or a kill-the-oncoming-enemies combat sequence. Both the Autobot and Decepticon campaign consist of four levels, each split up into four chapters. Progress is saved after successful completion of each chapter, and short rendered cutscenes introduce new chapters. None of the chapters are very difficult, but a few suffer from unclear objectives. Playing the game from the two perspectives (Autobot and Decepticon) is a great idea, but fails in practice. Both campaigns seem to rush the player through the plot. One fully fleshed-out campaign would be preferable over the two smaller, rushed campaigns.