I have to say up front, I have never watched this show at all. I do have several of the toys from it, but I have no idea what the show is like or how these characters act here compared to the show. That said, IMDB tells me all of the voice cast is different anyway. Also, from what I have gathered, the show follows the human cast, and these sort of, young Transformers, this game features those other Transformers, but centers on Bumblebee, whom is the only playable character.
That out of the way, the basic premise of Transformers Earthspark Expedition, you play as Bumblebee, and you have to gather these MacGuffin Cubed across three pseudo open world zones to stop a human named Mandroid from… I dunno, stealing all of Earth’s Energon to save his dying home planet of Cybertron.
No wait, wrong villain. I think Mandroid here is a bit more generally evil in his motivation. He also apparently has a large army of Transformer sized robots at his disposal, and has mind controlled or teamed with a few Cybertronian (Level Bosses). I don’t know if the drone mechs are in the show or if they are how they relate to Cybertronians, but I can say in this game, they don’t transform at all. They do come in a variety of shapes and sizes which requires you to use… more or less the same.basic tactics against all of them. Every enemy has a sort of stun meter that you can build by shooting them with an incredibly weak blaster, then when stunned, or if you like just dodging, you do the bulk of the damage by punching and kicking everything.
The dodge maneuver also has a sort of, Matrix Bullet Time effect that triggers if it’s times right.
Combat gets a little repetitious by the end of the game, though the game isn’t very long. It also only really gets repetitious by the third zone. As you progress through the first two zones, the enemies, sort of get harder and more interesting, different ranged attacks, some have shields, etc etc. For some reason, most of the third zone seems to be filled with easy to destroy level 1 mooks. By that point I had pretty much stopped bothering with stunning and was just, punching and dodging.
Maybe I was just, getting better at the combat. There are some ability upgrades you buy as you progress but none of them ever felt particularly upgradey.
Anyway, the game is Transformers, not, Transformer and a bunch of Transformer-like drones. It does have other characters. I recognize most of them from the toys, and IMDB says most of the Autobots are in all of the show, so I assume they are all part of the main cast there. Each shows up in the central hub base area as well as in the stages themselves dispatching mini games.
- Twitch – A little drone that you do some easy checkpoint races against
- Thrash – A motorcycle who asks you to defeat X enemies within certain areas within a certain amount of time.
- Nightshade – A dick owl whom I thought was cool because owls, who asks you to find these little orb things in different regions ridiculously fast then calls you slow and dumb when you fail.
- Hashtag – I think there was one Hashtag mission, you escort Hashtag, who turns into the slowest mini van ever, and defeat enemies.
- Jawbreaker – I want to say Jawbreaker turns into a bull, but the missions are basically a stationary version of the Hashtag mission while you protect some satellite dishes.
The humans on the show I believe all show up during the brief opening tutorial mission, but only the dad, Alex ever talks, and he serves as the sort of, mission leader, and shows up to Bee in person and as a hologram. Sometimes Optimus Prime also pops in on the comms to mostly just provide encouragement to Bumblebee. All of the voice acting is alright, except Optimus Prime, who is terrible. His voicing is fine, its just, a terrible Prime voice. And I am not even saying that from a “Its not Peter Cullen” angle, he just does not sound like the greatest Autobot warrior leader.
Aside from Mandroid, there are also a few villains serving as bosses for each of the three zones. Skullcruncher, the crocodile is the first boss, Grimlock is the second boss, and a rather interesting battle where you have to navigate through a circular maze while not getting killed by the Dinobot. The last stage has a pair of seeker laddies, Skywarp and Nova Storm, who basically take turns bullying poor Bee.
The basic gameplay is decent, it does have a few little iffy quirks. Falling from.any height causes an excruciating long stun moment. Not usually a problem. Other stun moments can be though. Sometimes when the game transitions to a boss, the boss door opens, the boss runs out, and they will attack you while you are frozen for the cut scene.
Probably the most annoying is that groups of enemies have a sort of, “attack area” where they are active or inactive. There are times where you could be standing “ten feet away” just outside of this attack area, and the enemy won’t come at you, nor can you pull them by shooting at them. They won’t take damage either. I get why from a “game perspective” but it can feel a little weird. Plus if you kite enemies out of these areas, they will often disengage and run back to their spawn area.
The level designs are also alright, but they are pretty linear, despite “feeling” open world. You do have to backtrack to get collectibles at times, but only the second stage really has choices in where to go. Also, I noticed in the third stage, the enemies got hung up a LOT on the map elements, which is kind of a positive just because its a testament to how dense the maps feel and are, but its kind of poor enemy pathfinding.
Overall, its still pretty enjoyable. It only took me like 8 hours to 100% finish though, so its pretty short. I think mine was part of a Humble Bundle, but in general, I would say its a game to look for on a discount at best. It definitely feels nicely Transformers, so Transformers fans will probably like it..
