Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What The Game's About
Following on from the film of the same name, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen casts players as both Autobots and Decepticons from the planet Cybertron that have come to Earth for various action-packed reasons. Long story short, players will guide the heroes and villains through a series of missions that include gameplay tropes such as Final Fight-style brawling, Need For Speed-type arcade racing, and Star Fox-esque aerial combat.

What's Hot
Fans of Transformers franchise lore will enjoy unlocking the many pieces of artwork and video clips hidden through the course of the adventure. Not all of the goodies are from the film, either; at one early point in the game I unlocked something from the 1980s Transformers cartoon (presented in loving VHS Distortionvision for an authentic aged VCR experience). Moreover, some of the film's cast have returned to provide the voices for the Autobots and Decepticons (meaning that, yes, Ironhide's smartass exclamations and comments remain intact).

Note that there are multiplayer modes for co-op and competitive gameplay, but these went unplayed for the purposes of this review for logistical reasons.

What's Not
Both Autobots and Decepticons are playable characters, but oddly enough they are not separated into distinct modes or storylines as one might expect to see. Instead, the single-player story mode jumps back and forth between opponents, sending players out to accomplish, say, a tactical strike on a Decepticon plan in one level and then in the next puts the player in control of the Decepticon who must escape the Autobot attack that the player just initiated a moment earlier. The whole experience left me feeling very counterproductive and unfulfilled.

Lazily-made Wii games have a knack for being visually uninteresting, and here we have one of the more fuzzily textured games I've seen on the platform in a while. The Transformers themselves generally look fine, but they're doomed to explore blurry locales. I'm not expecting top of the line performance here, but I did not plan on visuals that would have been criticized last generation, let alone this one. The Wii can do more than what Fallen asks of it, and it's a shame that we do not get to see it here.

One of the more glaring oddities of Revenge of the Fallen is that the Transformers do not, well, transform all that often. While the characters do flip into an automated super mode and then back at times, it seems strange to build a game around a group of characters that are chiefly known for a single attribute and then not allow them to make use of that attribute at the player's command. Imagine a Super Mario game that disallowed jumping or a Sonic the Hedgehog title set around slowness. While I make it a point to not judge a game based on what it doesn't do, I'm making an exception here because the previous Transformers game for the Wii did allow on-a-whim transformations. That game wasn't especially great either, but at least it let the player feel in control of the action. Here I feel as if I'm just reacting and not really driving the action.



Final Word
I could give you a detailed list of how Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen either disappoints or simply fails to impress, but we're talking about a video game based on a film based on a cartoon which in itself is based on a line of action figures and toys. This game only exists to feed the marketing machine, and as such isn't a dreadful game, but it isn't enjoyable either. Revenge of the Fallen is just going through the motions, borrowing elements from better games and combining them with material from the film to pad out the play time. The end result is blandly average and we've seen it all before. As Ironhide says when knocking a Decepticon grunt to bits, "Bye bye, Decepti-guy."