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Transformers: The Game

Some choice: bland or broken

There are very few graphics settings available in the game. Most notable is the option to use "Hi-Res" assets in-game, which will load more detailed models and textures. Curiously, with this option turned on, the ability to turn shadows on is gone. Without shadows, the game is basked in an ever-present and overwhelming glow. And it's not just dynamic shading that is missing when using Hi-Res assets - all shadows are gone, even the lighting that should be calculated statically prior to loading a level. Effectively, turning on Hi-Res assets reduces the visual experience to a pre-1997 level. Sure, the models are very detailed indeed; according to Activision, these are the same robot models used for the film, albeit with a lower polygon count than the rendered movie models. The Hi-Res textures are very nice and the increased environment detail is obvious. But without lighting and shadows (dynamic or static), the game world is an ugly, full-bright mess.

The solution to the lighting problem is to disable Hi-Res assets. With the standard models and less-detailed environment, the visual quality of the game world is significantly reduced. Even with shadows and lighting effects working and other visual amenities – such as 4xAA and bloom lighting – set to on, graphics are decidedly last-last-gen. The environment detail is reduced to the point of absurdity, with minimal landscape features and blocky buildings; think Quake-era polygon counts. Effects such as explosions are comical in their lack of and reminiscent, for some reason, of the cartoonish effects in Shogo. This would be a compliment, but unfortunately Monolith released Shogo almost a decade ago. I found myself yearning for Hi-Res assets, but just couldn't deal with the drop in immersion with no lighting.

The standard-resolution art assets are very bland.

Hi-Res assets are a great improvement, but the lack of shadows and lighting is too noticeable.

Activision states on their support site that Hi-Res assets and in-game shadows are mutually exclusive for performance reasons, but that's a ludicrous assumption. Plenty of games have graphics features which are too intensive for all but the very best contemporary hardware. That Hi-Res assets conflict with the lighting model seems to be a fundamental issue with the graphics engine. I verified this by turning on Hi-Res assets in-game and enabling shadows manually in the game's configuration file. At first, I thought I'd found the Holy Grail of Transformers graphics – the game looked stunning. But my joy was short-lived, as a number of graphical glitches popped up.

Projectiles disappeared and dynamic lighting was broken at times, leaving the camera basked in darkness for no good reason. The visual anomalies kept adding up, so I was forced to revert back to standard-resolution assets. This is disappointing, because the game looked very good indeed with Hi-Res assets and shadows forced manually. And shame on Activision for misleading consumers by advertising in-game screenshots from either the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 version of the game, which have no such technical issues with the lighting model.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Robot animations are well-done, but the quality of the game's other models and animations is laughable. There are first-generation Dreamcast games with higher-polygon models, and nothing here – from blurry textures to amateur-quality models – does PC hardware any justice. From vehicles to pedestrians (who, by the way, can't be harmed) to buildings, the lack of detail is striking. One of the game's selling points is a fully destructible world, but the game delivers on that promise in only the most basic sense. Picking up world objects, such as trees and statues, is an integral part of robot-on-robot combat, and just about any piece of scenery can be used in this manner. Most of the world can be broken up into smaller pieces, which seems like a cool feature until it's viewed in person. The effect isn't authentic, and the way that buildings take damage reminds me of replaceable damage textures from early FPS titles.

All will fear my giant swordfish!'

X marks the spot for this 1999-era explosion. Boom!

Decent voice acting supplements otherwise lackluster audio. Some of the voices from the film are here, including the transformers, which makes the cutscenes and in-game instructions from Optimus Prime and Megatron compelling. Music is passable, but not noteworthy. Sound effects, on the other hand, are horrible. Effects are all low-quality or canned, and repetitive. Little time was spent developing these tinny audio clips. The overall poor quality of the sound samples is exacerbated by a lack of support for hardware-accelerated or positional audio. Apparently the game's sound developers didn't have access to the high-quality audio assets from the film.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Modes & MissionsPage 3: Transforming combatPage 4: Quality of graphicsPage 5: Hardware requirements

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