Well that was certainly smart of Atari's Melbourne House development studio. Judging by the demo of the new Transformers game, they've figured out how to integrate mass-market appeal with gameplay features designed to keep me happy. I'm so used to thinking of these as mutually exclusive goals that I'm mildly in awe of the game right now.

First off, have a quick cut–'n'-paste off the Atari Web site:

Game Features:
• Play as Optimus Prime™, Red Alert™ or Hot Shot™
• Instantly convert from robot to vehicle mode on the battlefield
• Blast through boss battles against Megatron™, Starscream™, Cyclonus™ and Tidal Wave™
• Power-up the Autobots with over 40 unique weapons and combat abilities power-ups, including Homing Missiles, Rocket Launchers, Glide, Stealth and Tractor Beam
• Destroy armies of all-new Decepticlone Soldiers, Spider Tanks, Sentry Drones and Drop Ships

And from another press release:

"The game spans 8 environments across the Earth and on Cybertron. Each expansive environment is incredibly detailed and full of enemy Decepticlones. Specific objectives and numerous secondary objectives need to be accomplished in each location. There are hidden power-ups and unlockable extras that can be discovered through exploration."

So, cutting it all down to size, we've got three playable characters, eight levels, and a good variety of power-ups. Possibly a bit on the short side, but the demo gameplay shows a lot of promise so far, with a lot of good ideas well implemented.

Firing up the game, you'll get a choice of three Transformers to play as - Optimus Prime, Red Alert, and Hot Shot. For the sake of the demo, you're limited to Hot Shot, so that's the one we'll be seeing pictures of throughout. You also only get to play it on Easy, so those extra difficulty levels are remaining untested for now.

  

You also get to choose your options load-out, but this being level 1 means there's nothing to choose from yet. You get the standard blaster and the normal jumping ability and earn more as you go. Later on there will be some tough choices as to what the best selection of tools will be, but to start with you just grab your gun and go.

Normally not worth mentioning, the level loading screen is possibly one of the prettiest I've seen. You travel down a star field and all the abstract galaxy bits fly at you. I want this as my screen saver.

Warping into a clearing, I started tooling around with the controls. They're instantly accessible to anyone who's played a console FPS. Left analog is walk/strafe and right is look around. Walking is momentum-based, so you start off slow and get up to speed after a second or so. Your primary abilities are on the shoulder triggers and secondary ones get dumped on the face buttons. As an added convenience, the Zoom function is doubled up on the R3, with multiple levels of magnification available on repeated presses. It's a very friendly control scheme and I was up and running in only a few seconds.

Okay, so now it's time to find something to shoot. I work my way up the cliffside path, and at the top I'm greeted with one solitary bit of cannon fodder. A few shots and you get a nice satisfying explosion.

So far, so good. The enemy blew up good, with fragments everywhere. The valley I start in, though small, is nicely detailed with trees and grass. Moving on to see what else awaits, I crest the ridge and get this:

At this point, I'm impressed. We've got tons of trees, a good long draw distance, a ruined pyramid, a transport ship in the foreground, and a waterfall slightly off-camera obscured by a tree. There's also a transport ship flying by the pyramid, but I'll deal with it later. In the meantime, I make use of my zoom feature to look at what's ahead.

As it turns out that yellow glow is a Minicon, and those little guys act as the power-ups in the game. When you get them, you attach them to a shoulder button for activation, with the kind of power it provides determining where it can go. A quick bit of Decepticlone blasting later and I've got this guy:

And joy of joys, he provides homing missiles. Secondary fire gets attached below the R1 primary fire button, so that's easy enough. They're a bit tricky to use in the trees but all sorts of useful later on. Your average homing missile likes a lock-on before it'll do anything more than act like any other projectile, but these guys are aware of their surroundings. There's something satisfying about taking out an enemy covered by the angle of the rooftop he's on by shooting a missile 20 degrees (or so) over his head, only to see it notice him there and curve in for the kill.

And then I move on and blast the rest of the level to smithereens, and great fun is had. There's a lot of attention to detail in just about every aspect of the game, from the way light moves through the tree branches to the way your targeting reticule lets you know when an enemy is in range of missiles but not the standard gun. I have firefights in wooded areas, firefights in the pyramid ruins, and a firefight on an open road. All told, it's some rather nice variety for a 1/3-level demo.

There's even a tough choice ahead in terms of what power-up to use, with invisibility wanting to take the same shoulder button as the enemy detection visor.

 

Choosing the wrong upgrade isn't that big a deal, though. There are warps back to HQ scattered all throughout the level and you can reallocate resources there. It does bode well for later in the game, when those "40 unique weapons and combat abilities" start vying for attention. For this particular choice I went for the invisibility, seeing as it's just fun to walk up to an enemy (it even muffles the booming footsteps your several-hundred-pound Transformer makes) and blast him to bits.

  

All told, this is a game with a lot of promise judging from what I've played so far. It looks fine, it plays smooth, it's got an admirable attention to detail, and the enemies are fun to play with. About the only real knock against it is that I found the tranformation in the demo to be pretty useless. Yeah, I can turn Hot Shot into a car, but there was really no reason in the bit I played to do so. Still, the run & gun action I did get to play made up for it quite nicely. Now give me a harder difficulty level with Decepticlones that can shoot a bit straighter and I'm going to be a very happy gamer when Transformers comes out this May.

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· · · James Cunningham