Outright Games Transformers Battlegrounds was released last year and scored some favourable reviews, including an 8/10 score from TheSixthAxis, but is their follow up Robots In Disguise game just as good? Well it’s certainly different, dropping the RTS gameplay found in the first title for some action-adventure brawling with some jumping, puzzles and racing.
The game is clearly aimed at younger players and is set in the Earthspark continuity, a cartoon series that is hidden away on Paramount + in the UK. A quick summary of the plot of the cartoon is given at the start of the game –Â some kids touched a stone and made Transformers from Earth – but from then on those Terran Transformers are NPCs who dish out missions or help with upgrades. It’s Bumblebee who takes centre stage, a chirpy kid-friendly companion who very occasionally drops a joke for the adults watching. He has to defeat Mandroid, a human character who has an army of robot drones and who can control the minds of other Transformers.
Set over three zones you must complete missions across the play area to gradually weaken Mandroid’s influence on the zone, before unlocking his base and a boss fight with a fan-favourite character. Missions include battles with a time limit, races, and puzzles, and you can also collect Runes and Cards which further reduce Mandroid’s influence.
In a rather surprising move guns are secondary weapons in the game and you must rely on your fists, using combos and dodges to bounce between enemies like an Arkham game. While the combat is rather basic to begin with, you unlock new combos that allow you to put together some impressive moves with well timed dodges dropping you into bullet time so you can do extra damage… just like an Arkham game. The combos are quite inventive, although one is clearly swiped from the excellent Transformers: Devastation.
There are outpost across the map. Kill all the bad guys lurking there and you reclaim the area and then fast travel to it, like Far Cry et al, and while the races are fun the vehicle handling is pretty simplisitc so don’t expect to be drifting around corners or pulling off any stunts. Another mission has you locating parts of a device but there’s no real indication as to where they are apart from a very brief view during a pre-mission cut scene, once you know where they are it’s easy enough to a gold rating but until then it’s all trial an error, and a little frustrating.
Crucially the game has got the most important feature of any Transformers game absolutely spot on, and it’s the first time since the PlayStation 2 Transformers game this his been done correctly. It is of course, transforming. Not that the animation in any special, it does the usual trick of spinning Bumblebee so fast you can’t even see him transform, but its slick and happens quick enough to allow you to boost off a ramp, transform mid air and smack an enemy in the face. It’s immensely satisfying to race around a corner, zoom up to an enemy in car mode and transform at the last moment and land a suckerpunch.
So, Earthspark magpies a bunch of things from other games, and competently pulls them together with some great brawling. What lets it down is the detail. There’s a map, but no way to set waypoints and you’re just dumped in an area and left to wander around until you find something. You can return to your base to spend Mcguffins on power ups, but the return to base option is hidden on the pause menu and not the map, it took me ages to find it, who puts that feature there. Even if you do return to base you can’t power up until a certain point of the story, the indicators of where to stand to initiate power ups are all active but do nothing. Once again I spent ages pressing buttons trying to get things to work, time that could have been saved with a simple “You can’t do that now” message. Another annoyance is that the bolts that fly out from smashed crates – yep, like Ratchet & Clank – have to be quite close to Bumblebee for him to pick them up so you spend time manoeuvring in order to collect them all rather than the pick-up radius being the right size.
There’s also one other problem. To misquote Jeff Goldblum, “Eventually, you do plan to have Transformers in your Transformers game, right?” Apart from the three boss battles all the other enemies are humanoid robots or laser turrets, none of which transform.
