Transformers is that rarest of games. It’s the type of game you buy because it’s cheap and you figure you’ll get your $8 worth of entertainment from it. Then you play it and it’s just as good and wholesome as any of the flagship titles put out by the major game developers. Looking at its “pedigree”, there should be no way that Transformers should be any good at all; it’s based on a licensed property, developed by an unknown studio (Melbourne House) and published by Atari. Against all odds, however, this is one of the best action games on the PS2.

For starters, Transformers is amazingly pretty. Not “pretty for a PS2 game”. Not “pretty for a game from 2004”. If you let someone just look at footage for this game it looks like something that would be more at home on the original Xbox. There are 8 levels in the game and all of them are huge, detailed and beautiful. The first thing that strikes you is just how colorful the game is. It’s an amazingly refreshing feeling to be able to see different shades and hues of purples, blues and oranges when the rest of the game industry seems to think we want a never-ending sea of browns. There is also a noticeable lack of suspiciously placed walls of rock in this game. In some of the areas, you have to try really, really, really hard to find the invisible boundaries of the levels and even when you do find them, the game renders vast landscapes beyond the boundaries just to sell you on the illusion of space. The draw distance is pretty much endless. You can stand on one end of the levels and see clear to the other side and then you can go there. Within levels there is no loading, apart from the rare occasions when you enter into an interior location. Every rock, tree and shrub has a lot of detail that really helps sell you on the fact that you are, for example, in the middle of a giant rainforest or fighting on the frozen wastes of Alaska. The character models are very detailed too, with even the smallest of the enemy grunts receiving what looks like a very lavish amount of detail. And all of the tens of different weapons have their own special look, accompanied by all the appropriate lighting effects.

The weapons are another strong point of Transformers. The somewhat odd story deals with the Autobots and Decepticons racing to recover and take advantage of a set of smaller transformers called the Minicons from locations all over Earth. Many of the games' 8 levels have a number of Minicons scattered throughout, each conferring a different type of weapon or passive upgrade to your Transformer. Unlike in most other games, the Minicons that you acquire at the beginning of the game stay relevant throughout. This is mostly due to two very clever kinks in the weapon system: power levels and Minicon teams. You can choose one of 3 different Autobots (Optimus Prime, Red Alert and Hotshot) to use within each of the 8 levels and each of them has a different power level associated with them (10, 8, 8, respectively). Each Minicon also comes with its own power rating ranging from 1 to 4 and part of the strategy of choosing which Minicons to use comes from balancing their offensive punch with their power levels. You can’t just cram all the most potent Minicons into your Transformer since you wouldn’t have room for more than 2. On top of this, all of the Minicons are split into teams. Equipping Minicons from the same team will give you increased damage, capacity and recharge rate on every weapon or ability within that team.

It’s the little details, like the Minicon teams, that really show how well designed Transformers is. Most licensed games make compromises on almost all aspects of their production, but not this one. The graphics and the gameplay are, as I’ve already said, top of the class but where lesser developers might have skimped on the presentation or the audio aspects of the game, Melbourne House has not. They didn’t use simple text based menus, instead opting for neat looking and easy to understand pseudo-holographic maps and status screens inside of the Autobots base. They didn’t settle for in-game cutscenes throughout, preferring the use of CG of surprising quality. Scattered throughout all of the levels are Datacons, which when gathered unlock pieces of art from the games production and other bonus features. Even the music and sound effects all seem to have an extra layer of polish. You’ll never have trouble understanding what a character is saying or what your objective is. There are checkpoints located at convenient locations through all of the levels and, as an added feature, you can use these to warp back to your base and switch out your Minicons. The developers also, rather wisely, chose to keep the focus on the Transformers bipedal forms. You can transform into their vehicle forms but these are mainly used for quick traveling across the levels and not for some horribly designed and out of place vehicle sections.

There are, of course, a few problems. For one, while you do have 3 Autobots to choose from on each mission, I can’t think of a single reason to use Hot Shot. He can’t take as much damage as the others and his only outstanding feature is his speed which is not very useful. Another problem has to do with the difficulty levels in the game, which can best be described as unbalanced. The easy difficulty is a good romp through all the levels, not too easy nor too challenging but thoroughly enjoyable. The medium difficulty is where problems start showing up. Starting from the medium grunt enemy type, the second lowest enemy on the totem pole, every enemy now dodges far more frequently and can take what appears to be twice as much damage as on the easy difficulty setting. It feels ridiculous to be striding around as Optimus Prime wielding a 4-shot rocket launcher and powerful blaster and having as much trouble dealing with packs of medium grunts as you would with some of the bosses. The hard difficulty is just plain frustrating. The locations of all the Minicons are scrambled, so you never pick up the same one in the same location as before and the locations are different each time you play on the hard difficulty. You never know what you’re going to get and whether it’ll be useful in the near future. As a bonus, since you’ll be getting knocked down and killed so often you’ll also be treated to the ridiculous rag doll effects that accompany your knockdown animations.

Taking everything else about this game into consideration though, the problems described above seem really small when compared to all the other pluses that Transformers brings to the table. It makes a pleasant change to be able to sit down with a game and get far more than you were expecting. If, by any chance, you should come across this game buy it. It’s well worth the price of admission.

-Nikhil