Movie tie-ins. Like ’em or loathe ’em, they’re here to stay. Some fail because the narrative of the movie simply doesn’t sit well within the interactive form. Others fail because the IP just can’t survive a 12-14 hour experience. Transformers, however, comes closer than most.

Deceptacon or Autobot, your mission is to obtain and protect a widget called the Allspark, a device supposedly responsible for the creation of the Transformer, erm, species. So what’s the rub? Well, as you’d expect, there’s plenty of robots, and all – rather surprisingly – look magnificent, leading us to believe at first that perhaps we were in for something ever so slightly better than we had expected.

A pity then that the lengths to which Traveller’s Tales has gone to make the bots look so purrdy, seems to have been at the expense of just about everything else. Trees look flat and lifeless, vehicles and buildings seem to have undergone an almost total ‘detailectomy’, and the foolish human cattle that scurry in your wake look like they’ve been stolen from an abandoned PSP project.

Pretty much everything is destructible to some degree and a certain amount of fun can be had by just stomping around, bringing chaos and destruction to the impish mortals. Inconsistency, though, serves to ruin what would otherwise be a cohesive game world. Let’s take, for example, (what would laughably be called) the physics engine – an engine so powerful that it deems lobbing a canvas awning at an enemy to be far more destructive than hitting them with a tank or bus, or swatting them with a lamppost. Also, the campaign structure is basically the same mission played over and over again – run/drive to point A on map, blow something up, run/drive to Point B, rinse, repeat.

Despite all of this, though, for some reason, Transformers brought a smile to our faces more often than just the time we were informed that the main human character was called Sam Witwicky. HIGHLIGHT: Throwing things at things and watching not particularly interesting things happen as a result. Yes folks, that really is the highlight of the game. No, if you’re a die-hard fan of the series, you’ll probably forgive Transformers for its repetitive missions, cruddy controls and overpowered awnings and just enjoy shattering buildings into robo-detritus with your colossal iron fists instead. For the rest of you though, we find this hard to recommend.

Dan Howdle