Autobot, Welcome to DS

With every big budget action movie comes the tie-in's. In the case of the Transformers, I wouldn't expect anything else. Afterall, the whole Transformers thing was dreamed up by Hasbro as a line of toys which inspired a cartoon series / commercial. The toys and cartoons have changed a bit over the years and have seen rises and falls in popularity. With the new Transformers movie, they are seeing a major upswing. Transformers are everywhere, then again, so are many other toy lines from my child-hood. It's the 80's all over again in the stores what with Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars stuff everywhere. One thing that we have now that we didn't have then, is games based on these toys that have graphics that actually look like the characters. I love my old Atari games, but honestly, the blocky pixels on the screen take a lot of imagination to make them look like anything.

Speaking of Atari, one of their main game publishers, Activision, is alive and well and was in on making this new Transformers game. The DS version comes in two flavors: Autobots and Deceptercons. In the Autobots version, you play a "good guy" robot who comes to Earth to help defeat the evil Deceptercon robots and to protect the humans from them. Unlike many other games of this type, you actually get to upgrade and customize your hero.

The voice of Optimus Prime (no, you don't get to play him in this game, sorry) guides you through the game in tutorials that are well integrated into the story. I much prefer that to some games where you have to beat tutorials that are set in some practice lab or something before you even get into the game world. I sold my copies of games like Drakkengard 2 and Excite Truck for that reason. I got sick of doing the same tutorial over and over without being able to beat it and get into the actual game.

In Autobots, it isn't hard to satisfy the tutorial parts and get on with it. Your Autobot can transform into a bipedial walking robot or into a four wheeled vehicle. This is where the game gets really interesting: you get to change what kind of vehicle that is. You start out as a beat up old car but you get to find other cars, pickups, race cars, etc and scan them. Once you scan a new vehicle, you can go into the menu and choose that new car. Now, when you transform, you'll be a differnt car. You also get to upgrade your weapons and strength as you go along. You get missles with farther range, more powerful lasers, stronger punches etc. You can also unlock new abilities with enough XP. One I recently unlocked is the ability to climb up walls by pressing the X button while walking at a building.

Since this is the Autobot version, you want to be careful about what you destroy though. If you destroy too many cars, light poles, trees etc. the cops and eventually even the army will come and start chasing you around and shooting at you. If you transform into your vehicle form and drive away from them and don't damage anything for a while, they calm down and leave you alone again. You don't get powerups or points for destroying military or police vehicles. You do for destroying trees, poles, trash dumsters etc though.

The AI in the game isn't very complex. You don't see people running around and even the cars you see don't flee in panic when you transform into a giant robot or shoot things. They crash into you though. Even when you are a car, they don't try to avoid you and you have to do some defensive driving or shoot them once you upgrade to a car mounted gun to avoid getting damage from them.

The graphics are not bad for a 3-D DS game. They suffer from the jaggies close-up and some of the textures remind me of ones I saw in the old game Doom, but otherwise it looks pretty good. They do a good job of showing the stars of the game, the robots though. The trasforming animation is cool and has appropriate sound effects. You also damage the ground when you jump which helps make your robot seem bigger. You don't damage buildings much though. I was dissapointed in that given that another DS game, Mechwarrior Tactics lets you tear down everything, even buildings if you want to.

The touch screen is used for the menu system which is pretty easy to use once you figure out what the icons mean. The thing that looks like an hexagon in the left side is your map and clicking on it with the stylus shows where you are in the city versus your checkpoints. Sometimes you can also use the map to choose where you want to start in the level. Below that icon in the menu is the XP, leveling and energy bar. To the right of that, is the transform button which looks like the Autobots logo. Click on it to change between robot and car. It's placed in a handy spot to hit with your thumb too if you need to change in a hurry. Above this icon, is the scan button which looks like a bullseye. You use this to scan cars so you can look like them. It's kind of like the scan feature in the Gamecube version of Metroid. In the middle is your radar which shows where you are as well as checkpoints and enemies once they transform into robots. When they are vehicles, you can't tell them from the human vehicles. They likewise seem to have trouble finding you if you are a car too. This makes for some neat cat and mouse senarios.


The music is standard action game fare and nothing to write home about. It isn't very catchy and you wont find yourself humming along. However, it doesn't get on your nerves like the music is some games do. The sound effects are spot on for what you'd expect them to be in a DS game. I especially like the effects in the menus.

Shooting works pretty well most of the time. Sometimes, the auto aim will aim at a civilian car when you are trying to aim at a bad guy so you have to move a bit to get back on target. Shooting is best used at a distance as it's hard to aim at close range. Up close, it's better to go in swingig with a tree or light pole. You can grab objects even cars and other robots with the X button and them swing them around with the A button. Pressing the X button again while holding something throws it. The mele combat in this game reminds me of Justice League Heros for the DS.

Overall, I'd say Autobots is not a bad game for a movie based DS game. It isn't likely to win Game of the Year by any magazine but it's still fun to play, especially if you were a big Transformers fan in the 80's like I was.