The management board over at Hasbro must be clutching their fat guts and laughing all the way to the bank. Not only did they succeed in the 1980s at getting a whole generation of snot-nosed kids to nag their parents until they bought every toy associated with the Transformers TV show (itself a marketing ploy), but now the multi-million dollar Michael Bay film heralds a brand new wave of products, and a brand new wave of whining kids.

You've heard it all before, the vagaries of the movie-tie-in game (for the record, the best one is Chronicles of Riddick, which actually rocked!). Once again we have a fairly decent developer at the helm to give it credibility (Traveller's Tales made the LEGO games) and once again we have a very rushed product with many faults.

Transformers: The Game lets you choose your side, Autobots or Decepticons, and it actually follows the film's storyline fairly closely for the first few levels. As the Autobots your mission is to cruise around the open city and get to a bit green glowing spot and then shoot the shit out of any Decepticons that appear. Only you're not allowed to leave an imaginary circle (area of action) or you'll fail the mission. As an Autobot you're also not supposed to cause destruction of the city, a task that is pretty much impossible given that the buildings will crumble into a million pieces if you so much as fart in their direction.

Adding to the annoyance is the fact that even if you do decide to explore the city (there are collectibles and side missions available) you'll be reminded every seven nanoseconds that you should really continue to the mission marker. You will eventually come to hate this audio snippet, despite the fact that both Frank Welker and Peter Cullen have come on board to reprise the voices of Optimus Prime and Megatron.

Another huge problem with the game is that the driving model is way too sensitive with no feeling of inertia. Turn in any direction and you're likely to do a Tron-like move, careening into nearby buildings, which will then enrage you because you may be in a timed mission or chasing some Decepticon goon and you end up failing the mission. In the end, it just becomes quicker to transform into your humanoid form and walk there.

Actually, transforming looks pretty cool, and the game's graphics are fairly polished. It's just unfortunate that every single mission, for both teams, consists of the same repetition: go to the green marker, get to point X or shoot certain amount of X, then stay in the mission circle while waves of enemies come at you. Combat consists of punching and blocking, and the occasional thrown object.

You may be thinking that it would be cool to play as your favourite Transformer character, but sadly every single character in the game feels the same – even the ones that fly (or burrow) rather than drive. There's no differentiation and the game suffers terribly because of it.

I guess if I had to pinpoint some positives it would be that the Decepticon missions are a lot more fun than the Autobot ones, and they mostly take place in a different area and have more of a destructive nature to them. You'll relish the chance to get rewarded for the exact opposite reasons why the Autobot missions were so frustrating because as the Decepticons you're freely allowed to lay waste to anyone and everything in your path. It's not that playing as the bad guys is usually more fun, but rather the Autobot missions are just so boring and terrible that they magnify the tiny amount of enjoyment you have playing as the Decepticons, but even that isn't enough to redeem this average game. Give it a rent, but save your money for something else.