Instead of Vicarious Visions, the people who were responsible for the last few Autobots/Decepticons Nintendo DS dual game releases, Behaviour Interactive signed up as the developer for this movie's Nintendo DS game versions. And I have to say, I really am starting to miss Vicarious Visions.
    This game is still a shooter, but it plays a bit differently from Vicarious Visions' various Nintendo DS TF outings-- it's considerably simpler, for one. First off, the things that are the same-- you still use the touch screen to transform between your robot and vehicle modes; you still have a bit of auto-aim (although you don't have to press any buttons this time around to target a robot-- it auto-targets for you, depending upon which enemy is closest to your ever-present reticle in the middle of the screen. You have two weapons-- your primary weapon/machine gun, fired using the X button, which has unlimited ammo; and your secondary weapon/missile launcher, fired using the Y button, which has ammo you pick up from fallen enemies and does a lot more damage. These weapons are the same no matter which character you play as, and you can also melee attack. You and your enemies have two bars, but it's not health and energy-- rather, the blue one is your health while the orange one is your "armor". Basically the deal is that your armor depletes first, but can be regenerated slowly after you don't take damage for a bit. However, once your armor is toast your Energon/health starts to go down, and this can never be regenerated unless you get Energon cubes from your fallen foes. (Given that every foe drops both Energon and 3x missiles, though, it hardly makes your health or secondary ammo scarce. Although I got close once or twice, I never died in either game from health depletion. On the rare occasion that I did die, it was because I fell into a pit that was too deep or summat-- more on that later.) These core mechanics are simple, but solid-- they control well enough, are easy to understand, and the targeting and firing mechanisms work well. In addition, your movement is as you'd expect from your respective character, with lighter characters moving a bit faster. You can also strafe and turn around a solid 180 by a couple different button presses, so you never feel overly-stiff or anything like that.
    The vehicle mechanics are a bit more dicey. You have the standard acceleration/brake controls, but your vehicle runs like the ground has a thick covering of oil on it-- good thing there's no precisely-controled vehicle-driving segments in the game. You can activate stealth force mode with a simple button press, allowing you to fire your machine gun (but only your machine gun) while still having the increased speed of vehicle mode-- which honestly means there's no reason to have a regular vehicle mode at all, I'm not sure why it's even included.
    The problem with this game is that it's SO incredibly simple and repetitive. Here's how you play: Follow the main path on the radar map, gunning down sets of two or three enemies at a time. These enemies appear out of nowhere, sometimes so close they can melee you as soon as they spawn. There is very little variety in the enemies-- there's a light enemy, a medium enemy, and a heavy enemy, differing only by how much damage they can take. Worse still, there is only ONE team of enemies you will encounter per level. So if you start off a level and you encounter two mediums and a heavy, guess what? You're fighting teams of two mediums and a heavy for the rest of the level. Sometimes they'll appear on the clear, usually singular path in front of you, sometimes you'll be stuck in a room surrounded by force fields and they'll come at you from multiple sides, but it's ALWAYS the same team for the entire level. This makes up about 95% of the gameplay, right there. You do go through a few different environments-- a city, a NEST base, Siberia, a construction area-- but they're only aesthetic changes and have no real gameplay significance. You never gain new abilities or new enemies that require special tactics to defeat. Just gun, gun, gun, move to your next location. You also can play the entirety of the game in robot mode if you want-- there's no need to ever use your vehicle mode. Plus, with the generous number of health and ammo pickups, as well as the numerous auto-checkpoints throughout each level, it's a very easy game with no real challenge. In almost every case, you have to actively TRY to die.
    There are some boss fights scattered throughout the game, but they're extremely oddly done. Basically you fire at them and a few expendable enemies for a while (again, no strategy whatsoever, just fire at them), then when the boss is at about half health they turn tail and run. Follow them and meet them at the next place where you're boxed in, and the process repeats again. And again. And again. And again. Usually about six, seven, eight times, and then the level is done. You never actually defeat them, as they always run off, so there's no real satisfaction from defeating them.
    There's some RPG-lite elements in the game, with anywhere from 1 to 3 special glowing polygons hidden in each level-- though only a few them are actually "hidden", usually if you explore the short branches off of the main path you'll find them all fairly easily. Sometimes to get the glowing polygons you'll have to use your character's special power, but even this doesn't make much of a difference in the characters' levels, as you only use these special power areas to get the out-of-the-way glowing polygon. And what's weird is that, beyond the character you play as in the tutorial level, you're never told what the "special power areas" look like for your characters (they're easy to miss), so you have no idea beyond experimentation if you're right next to one or not (usually the glowing polygon nearby is a good hint, but you always can't see those). Anyways, in case you're wondering, Bumblebee and Lockdown can swing on a pole to jump across gaps, Ironhide and Megatron stand on a special unremarkable pad to do a double-jump up to high areas, Optimus and Soundwave can slide across telephone poles, and Mirage and Crowbar use a ramp to run along the side of a wall for a short distance. Given that you're fixed in which character you play as in each mission, this would've been a great way to spice up the missions a bit more beyond looking for that one special pad in a branch off the main path to do your special ability, but nope. Otherwise each character plays pretty much the same as the other, with only minor health/speed differences between each. After each level, you can spend these "glowing polygons" to unlock various upgrades that apply to all your characters, such as more health, more ammo for your primary weapon, things like that. You then use experience points you've accrued from defeating enemies to actually activate the upgrade you've unlocked. You'll get waaaay more experience over the course of the game than you'll spend, though, and if you find of the glowing polygons in the game you cam max level-up everything, so it's not like it requires you to make much of a choice about what you're going to emphasize. Given how easy the game is, by the time you get a few upgrades under your belt you won't really need anymore, anyways.

    The main story of each game takes place across 12 chapters/levels, each of which take about 15 minutes to complete. Do the math-- that's only about 3 hours of play time for each game, TOTAL. And I wasn't even hurrying or anything. That's simply pathetic for a $30 retail game, it's more like something you'd expect from a cheap cell phone game. Finding hidden upgrade polygons adds MINOR replay value, but again, most of them are easy to find. Oh, and calling the campaign a "story" is a bit overstating it-- the story is extremely minimalist and even contradictory. Yes, it follows the PS3/360 version's story of the Decepticons freeing Shockwave, but that's about all you'll get out of it. What's worse, the story goes out of its way to make you realize how much action you're missing while you go mindlessly shoot down another 30 robots, all in identical groups of three. In the brief intro bits for each mission, you'll often hear stuff like how Mixmaster is trying to get the Constructicons back together again to form Devastator, or how there's a full assault on the NEST base. But what do YOU have to do? Chase Starscream for no reason or create a distraction, which have little if anything to do with the interesting stuff that the other Autobots are doing off-screen. And you never find out what comes of such sub-plots anyways, they're always immediately forgotten by the next chapter without any resolution. The briefing will sometimes even contradict what you'll be doing. One such mission has Prime telling you that Crowbar has a bunch of enemies around the area, and for you to find out what he's up to. Usually this implies that you'll, y'know, at least meet Crowbar, if not fight him. Nope. Just another mindless enemy run-n-gun. In fact, you don't fight Crowbar at all through the entire Autobot game. Also, regardless of which game/side you play, the story ends the same, with the Autobots winning, but with Shockwave somehow broken out (they never explain in either story how that happened, or even show Shockwave until the last cutscene). So all those Autobots you whooped on and destroyed as the various Decepticons? Doesn't matter, the game says at the end you lost all those battles and barely freed Shockwave by the skin of your teeth! Ugh.
    To try to add some variety to the game, sometimes you'll have to enter "scan mode" by pressing the relevant button on the touch screen and hack into a satellite dish or computer. Minigame time! Well, if you consider pressing one button on the touch screen once when it shows your faction's symbol (and refraining from pressing it when it shows your enemy's faction symbol) a game. Yeeeah.
    For the most part the game plays like it's programmed to, but there are a few odd glitches-- for one, in a couple of levels there's a couple of pits that when you fall into, you die for some weird reason. They're not really any deeper than any other pits you've fallen into, you just die in these for whatever dumb reason. Good thing there's only a couple of them and they're all on branches of the main path. Also, the frame rate sometimes takes a nose dive when you've got a lot on screen-- what's especially odd about this is that it happened very, very rarely on my playthrough of the Decepticons version, but it happened pretty much everything there was a heavy enemy in sight on my Autobots version.
    There are some genuine positives to the game, however. For one, the menu system is cool, with you zooming around this big enclosed TRON-like space when going in between menus, sometimes even going through gear-laden corridors to get to particular menus. The music is also great, very movie-esque and with a great amount of drama and epic-ness to it-- much of it was done by the Steve Jablonsky, who directed the movie scores himself! The voice acting is also fairly good, with the cast from the "main" console version all returning, except for Megatron who's played by another gruff-sounding game. (Unfortunately, this still means Ratchet sounds completely different from the actual movies.) The characters new to these games, Crowbar and Lockdown, have decent voices as well, the former being voiced by Steve Blum (Prime Starscream), the latter being voiced by someone who does an admirable job of sounding like a synthesized, movie-esque version of Animated Lockdown. The graphics are decent enough, though it is the DS and you're trying to put together very complex designs, so it's not mind-blowingly good for the system or anything.
    The game also has multiplayer, but each person has to have a DS DotM Autobots or Decepticons game card, and I don't know anyone else personally who has this game, so beyond saying that it has a few different modes like Team Deathmatch and seeing who survives longest against waves of enemies, I can't tell you much. Given how the rest of the game is, though, I would bet it isn't particularly riveting.

    It's interesting how, with each successive movie the "main" console games have gotten better, while the portable DS games have gotten worse-- in this case, much worse. The Dark of the Moon DS games have solid gameplay controls at their core, but they're incredibly simplistic to the point of being boring, with you always having pretty much the same objectives of shooting down wave after wave of nearly-identical enemies and repetitive boss gun-downs. The irritatingly incomplete and contradictory story and characters who all play pretty much the same way don't help much, either. I guess I should've taken the hint when they packed in exclusive-decoed Speed Stars figures with each game to help them sell. Not worth it, even for big DotM fans and even on discount. Vicarious Visions, come back! I miss you!

Graphics: 7/10
Music: 10/10
Gameplay: 5/20
Storyline: 1/10
Level Design: 3/10
Cutscenes: 3/10
Controls: 14/20
Replayability: 3/10

Technical Issues -2

Overall Rating:44/100 Below Average

(Screencaps taken from Gamespot.com)

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