Transformers Armada (PS2)
Developed by: Melbourne House
Published by: Atari

I’m so sick of playing crappy Transformers games and it’s about friggin time they made a good one. Well I think it’s safe to say Transformers Armada is the best one to date.

As the story goes, this race of Transformers called the Mini-cons have been lost for millions of years now, and all of the sudden they show up on Earth. Now it’s your job to harvest them before the Megatron and his punk ass goons get to them first. Once you find some Mini-cons, you can equip them to enhance your powers.

This game is a 3rd person shooter/vehicular, driving, flying/1st person game. When you transform into vehicle mode the controls are similar to any driving game on PS2. The 1st person mode is optional, but I find that this mode is the best. As far as transforming goes, there isn’t really a point to it that I’ve found, but you’ll want to do it just because it’s cool and you can. The game can get repetitive, but you get large non-linear levels to explore for secrets and other goodies.

Transformers Armada looks very impressive and you can tell it is pushing the limits of the PS2 to the max. The first thing you’ll notice in the game are the crazy ass graphics that it sports. There are nicely detailed, lush environments, and nicely modeled NPCs and players. However it does suffer from slow frame rates at some points, especially when there are a million guys on screen wanting to make you into a can opener… or even someone’s bitch.

The word “Transformers” is enough for many of us to deposit stuff in our pants… out of sheer excitement of course. Just don’t expect anything sophisticated in this game, and be prepared to lock and load because “Megatron must be stopped no matter the cost”.

7.8 on my ass kick meter — Chian