This is Really Bad
This is a MUCH better game than the original game.
This is what is constantly labeled as "damning with faint praise". The game is better than the last one, but games have improved much more since that time, so the original, which was merely sub-par, is supplanted by a better game that, by any comparison standard, is amongst the worst games released this year.
The game certainly looks better. This no longer looks like an up-res'd PS2 game. It now just looks like an ugly and compressed 360 game. So, uh, kudos to Luxoflux for that achievement.
This game, apparently, is a tie-in with the new movie (I'm seeing it tomorrow, so I have no clue how much it follows the movie). You're trying to help the humans deal with the invasion of the Decepticons and to defeat the new uber-boss, The Fallen. The plot is not any deeper than this, but it's based on a movie made by Michael Bay, so this is not a surprise.
The designers now allow your guns to work. In the last game, every enemy blocked ever bullet and missile you launched at them (but not other brutal projectiles like cardboard cell phone cut outs), which meant that it was a melee festival for a game that didn't do melee well. Fortunately, here, it's all ordinance. You'll be firing all sorts of shit at your adversaries. You can fire guns, missiles, delayed grenades, etc. You even get a special attack, which can freeze enemies or populate turrets around you.
The game is also sliced up into small chunks. I beat the Autobot mission and my average level completion time was about 6 minutes. So, no, the levels aren't long. And the world isn't a laughably destructible as they were last time. Buildings don't collapse because you brushed up against them. The humans are actually on your side when you're the Autobots, so you don't have to deal with police AND Decepticons constantly.
So, some of the annoying bugs last time got fixed.
They just forgot to make the game fun.
It is a tedious slog. The levels are small and you don't find a ton of enemies, but the camera is spastic and you have so many buildings that trying to fight a boss is an exercise in frustration. You also have to defend buildings, but have no idea how much damage the building has sustained. Your weapons overheat damned quickly. And your vehicle form feels slow as all royal hell. The levels, while in varied areas, all feel really similar. Cairo and Shanghai feel really similar, except old ruins replace buildings in levels that feel like they were designed almost identically.
This game is sketchy as a rental and a fiasco as a buy option.
