It’s not every day that I have much of anything good to say about a game translation of a movie, especially one that I have such mixed feelings about to begin with as Transformers.  But the Transformers game, not so ironically entitled Transformers: The Game and now available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, PC, and a panoply of portable systems, managed to do something a little interesting, and thus earns a couple extra points.

See, in Transformers: The Game, playing as the Autobots basically lets you go through the movie, where you’re out to recover the AllSpark before the Decepticons do, and you’ve got to protect Sam Witwicky and basically do all those things you did in the movie.  Meanwhile, if you play as the Decepticons, you get to do the exact same thing just from the Decepticon side.  In fact, if you actually WIN as the Decepticons, you’ll manage to unlock a whole new ending, which will not turn out to be a surprise, but the sheer fact that a game translation of a movie took that kind of effort is worth noting.

We all know that most movie to game translations are shovelware of the highest magnitude.  This month’s PC Gamer, for example, refers to those who work PR for licensed games as having one of the “worst jobs in the gaming industry” and describes their work as “unthusiasm” and “soul crushing”.  They’re on par with retail gamer store workers, game testers, mascots, and the poor sucker who works the Xbox Live abuse reports box.  So for a movie to game translation to show a little initiative—like making alternate endings for the two warring factions—is a noteworthy step.  Not a HUGE noteworthy step, but a noteworthy step nonetheless.

The down side, of course, is that the gameplay sucks out loud.  All you do is transform, roll out to a certain destination, transform, beat some robots down, transform, roll out to your NEXT destination and repeat it until either you win the game, your eyes start to bleed or you curl up into a fetal position wailing about how you’ve wasted your life.  Believe me, that sort of thing happens more often than you think.

Yes, it’s the kind of game you’ve played literally over and over again for the last few years now and it hasn’t gotten that much better.  Sure, they went the extra mile and for that I’ll give them due credit but it’s really little more than a massive pile of elephant dung that happens to have an orchid growing out of it.  That one particular part of the whole may be pretty but the rest of it is just crap.

So basically, if you’ve seen the movie a few dozen times, can’t get enough of the ORIGINAL voice of Optimus Prime (that’s another critical area of importance—seems the games brought back Peter Cullen and Frank Welker to handle the original voices,  at least that’s the case on the Wii version), and are willing to put up with a whole lot of more of the same, then this is the game for you.  Otherwise, well, you’re probably better off staying away from movie to game translations entirely.