2004 saw a fine little Transformers game released. Published by Atari, the game Transformers Armada: Prelude to Energon enjoyed favourable reviews and a warm reception amongst fans of the 'formers.

As for the new game, based on the movie that's plundering tills at cinemas across the globe? Tepid. And that's being kind. Because it's the latest so-so tie-in to a so-so movie, the ilk of which it will go down in the books as blighting the gaming summer of 2007. If anyone still cares.

The game allows you to take the side of either the Autobots or Decepticons, and it broadly follows the plot of the film itself. Each side has a campaign to follow and both are an excuse for carnage, action and, in theory, plenty of fun.

These campaigns break down into individual levels, and these environments are then deliberately left open for you to explore at will. Not that there's much to explore. Open environments are all well and good, but if there's not much to them in the first place, then it swiftly becomes a moot feature.

Anyway, it's soon down to the missions themselves, which you accomplish via combat and zooming from place to place. At first these are great fun. Transforming, particularly in the early stages, is addictive in itself and the amount of wanton destruction you can employ is considerable.

But soon the problems mount up. That destruction, for instance, is so wanton as to become commonplace: so much is destroyed so easily and so often that there's no majesty to it. It just happens, and you play the game while it gets on with it.

The combat, too, is really quite unsatisfying. The targeting system, for instance, makes things unnecessarily tricky and some of the in-game weapons don't seem to have much point to them.

In short, the missions quickly begin to irritate, and then you notice that the transforming itself is a short-term buzz and that the look of thing really isn't making good use of the technology it sits upon. And then you start looking out of the window. And then you turn it off.

Sure, the developers have tried to throw in one or two longevity tricks, primarily hiding lots of cubes around a level, but this isn't enough. Because, while there's about an hour of enjoyment in it, Transformers The Game simply comes nowhere near close to warranting the £50 asking price, and would even make a questionable rental. Dig out that 2004 game instead, would be our advice.

A lazy, unambitious, sporadically enjoyable but ultimately underwhelming piece of console gaming entertainment.