After the splendid adventures we had playing through War For Cybertron as a co-op team of 2 or 3 and the spankingly spectacular new movie, we were expecting a lot, but Dark of the Moon suffers a bit, from both our unrealistic expectations and the law of diminishing returns.

In Dark of the Moon the Transformers now have three states; normal bipedal Robot form, Stealth Force mode (the vehicle state only with weapons bristling and ready) and standard vehicle form. Stealth Force mode means extra firepower and also manoeuvrability as vehicle’s wheels act like casters, so you can strafe just like in a FPS. Stealth Force mode also lets you target lock with ‘LB’, jump with ‘A’ and hold the ‘L’ trigger to go into proper vehicle disguise. Now you control the vehicle’s speed with the ‘L’ stick and steer with the right; pressing ‘RB’ is turbo mode for long jumps (or road-killing smaller enemies) and you can drift around corners by holding the ‘R’ trigger. From vehicle mode you can either release the ‘L’ trigger to transform back to Stealth Force mode or click ‘L3’ to slickly stand up in full robot form. The transformations are superbly done and never impede the combat at all.

Zooming along in your vehicle form or beefed-up weaponized Stealth Force mode and clicking the left analogue stick to smoothly transform into your Autobot sounds like an absolute blast, and it is, until you realise just how fragile most of them are in their robot forms. This means you spend a good part of the game driving around taking pot shots at enemies and hitting and running, not the best of news for a franchise built around the archetypal robots that know no fear. The damage indication is also extremely vague, so initially I found myself dying frequently before I even knew what had hit me. I shouldn’t have started on the “Hard” setting, as, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s HARD.

The multiplayer mode comprises of a straightforward all-on-all or team deathmatch game for 2-10 players, or a game called ‘Conquest’ in which each team battles for control over a set of power nodes. You can design your own Transformer and choose whether it should be Autobot or Decepticon, which class they should be from: Scout (car), Hunter (plane), Commander (truck) or Warrior (tank). You can choose a custom weapon and ability set, a larger selection of which unlock as you level up. You can also choose your own colour scheme and rename the class.

War For Cybertron was great but the constant search for ammo soon became tiresome, and thankfully that no longer seems to be a problem as most weapons seem to have unlimited ammo (although you can reload a partially used clip and weapons reload automatically when unequipped.) This gives the game more of a Michael Bay-ish feel, I think it suits the Transformers style better than ammo hunting and I definitely prefer it.

Abrupt deaths were a frequent problem for me, even on the ‘Normal’ difficulty setting. You seem to swan along quite happily blasting Decepticons here, there and everywhere but, particularly in robot form, damage seems to accumulate very quickly if you get caught napping.

In the original Transformers game and in Revenge of the Fallen you could climb buildings by holding ‘B’, but for some unknown gameplay-related reason this ability as been removed. I hope it wasn’t to make room for grenades, because they’re kinda crap and not a very authentic Transformery thing to have anyway.

Other gripes include some of the objects, switches et cetera that you interact with that are fiddle-farty to actually make work, and you’ll standing there half a sodding pixel away from the place where the switch works despite that fact that it says “press X to interact”. These are never fatal in battle, but annoying nonetheless.

Despite the game having tons of explosions and heavy weapons there’s also a lack of destructible scenery, the damage that does occur seems very localised and there are no collapsing buildings and the like. This could be because several of the human-inhabited areas are also used for the multiplayer maps, and the game engine clearly wasn’t designed for as much destruction as perhaps a Transformers game should have. When any large structures, walls etc. do get blown up it feels very scripted.

The sound really booms the weapon effects out and the music by Jeff Broadbent, Bobby Tahouri and Steve Jablonsky (who did the orchestral score for the movie) is excellent and matches the action perfectly. Many of the voice actors from the movie also appear in the game, which adds a lot.

This is a good, solid, and at times spectacular, game that doesn’t quite have the ‘Wow’ factor of some of the other big name shooters, and lacks the all-round appeal of its predecessor. But if you love the Dark of the Moon movie, this is a pretty good way of expanding the Bay-universe Transformers story.