Beat The Autobot Storyline
Now that I’ve beat half of the Transformers Movie game, I’ve been revisiting the different areas that I’ve already beaten. There are several areas to explore: the suburbs, the Hoover Dam, and the city. There are six chapters in each storyline, and each area comprises two chapters. You can go back to each chapter to find items and play mini-games.
There is a lot to do once you go back. There are 100 yellow cubes to collect in each chapter, five skill points to earn, and three mini-games to play. The timed mini-games are Racing (run through the area hitting all the nav-points), Sumo (through all opponents out of the ring), and Destroy (kill all opponents). These get more difficult as the chapters increase.
Skill points are earned in Skid, Throw, Jump, and Speed. You can get these at any time, not necesarily after the end of the chapter. For example, Speed is earned by going fast for a significant amount of time. Throw is my favorite: in robot mode, you pick up and item and throw it. If it stays in the air longer than timer, then you win. It’s fun to throw different stuff down the block, like the hamburger on top of the “Chip Chase” fast-food restaurant.
The problem is that you can’t tell what you’ve got already. There is no way to display accomplishments or items collected. I may have earned four of the five skill points in the third chapter, but I can’t tell. I can’t find any more yellow cubes in the first chapter, but I don’t know how many are left. I think I got 96, but there’s no way to tell. There’s also no “x-ray vision” to find the lost ones — a power-up like the “energon scanner” in the PS2 Armada game would be very welcome.
Part of me wonders why I am bothering to go back to finish the chapters. The whole point is to unlock bonus content after you’ve completed the storyline. Unfortunately, all of the bonus content is in low resolution, best suited for television sets that console games use. Would it have killed Activision to find the high resolution images for the PC version of the game? Or if the images were too big, then how about a downloadable upgrade to provide these? There are also seven bonus videos, but they are only promos or commercials that I’ve already seen, nothing created specifically for the game. No good stuff for you!
It seems like an awful lot of effort to go through to get crappy bonuses. However, getting the bonuses does prolong game play, which isn’t terrible. I would almost say that I’ve enjoyed the mini-games and cruising the areas free-style more than playing the actual first storyline. Some of the boss battles were fun, like Shockwave (who triple-changes from a helicopter to an anti-aircraft gun to a G1-inspired robot), but the rest of the game was pretty monotonous. I’ll have to try the Decepticon storyline next, which I heard will be much more satisfying (Task: blow up 80% of the city).
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