These skills came to bear fully when we watched a little tussle against the whirling blade arms of Barricade. Since he had an energy shield on, just laying back and peppering him with shots wouldn't work, but picking up a nearby section of fencing and chucking it at the guy seemed to do the trick. From there, it was just a lather/rinse/repeat sequence of wearing down the shields and then laying into Barricade with plenty of punches -- this is until he transformed into his vehicular mode and sped off.

With the drones and boss partly dispatched, the game then became something of a race to get to Sam's house against Barricade's new cop car form. This was, clearly, something of a tutorial about transforming into a vehicle (in this case, Bumblebee turned into -- ugh -- a Camaro) and hauling ass to a waypoint marker on the map. Along the way, we got to see the arcadey physics of the cars as they powerslid all over the place and fought traffic on the way. Since transforming was always an option, even getting blocked by oncoming traffic wasn't a huge deal; just pop out, kick a couple cars out of the way, and then zip back into car mode, kicking on a little of the auto-recharging nitrous to catch up.

That was the Autobot side, though, and we were curious about playing as the bad guys. As it turns out, being bad is about as much fun as you'd think. Under the heavily armed might of helicopter-turned-humanoid asskicker Blackout, we watched as the Qatar base that you may have seen in the trailer, was utterly wiped out via combination of air-to-air attacks on other, smaller choppers and ground targets roasted with rocket fire and the occasional football field-length kick to the odd tank here and there while in non-chopper mode. Switching back and forth seemed fluid and quick, which made for some fun jump/Transform combos. Changing altitude and flying around was all accomplished with the analog sticks, which shouldn't surprise anyone who's played a helicopter game in the past couple years, and it seemed to work well.

Though it was early, all of the game's core bits seemed to work well, in fact. The transformation sequences couldn't be nearly as lengthy or intricate as in the movie just out of virtue of keeping players in the game, but what was there was solid enough. The gaits of the different Transformers all felt weighty and lumbering, and the physics, though a little on the touchy side, at least offered up plenty of excuses to throw cars at buildings. We actually peeked at the 360 build rather than the PS3, and even it was a little choppy on the framerate tip, but hey, it was early, and the lighting and detail on the Transformers (though not the world itself) was actually quite impressive.

One final note: apparently there will be challenges in place for doing random things like destroying buildings, cruising at high speed, getting jumps and so on. These challenges are different for every level, but they're the key to unlocking the Ubiquitous Licensed Game Bonus Contentâ„¢. We didn't get a chance to see any of that as it wasn't implemented yet, but we did get to see a low-res, highly compressed version of CG gurus Blur doing their pre-rendered take on the world of the Transformers. The clash between Prime and Megatron was epic and it looked friggin' awesome. We can't wait to see wrecking balls being used to slam a Transformer into a building in glorious HD.

With a few more weeks to go and plenty of time for cleanup and polish, we're genuinely interested in seeing how the game turns out. Though there are plenty of people out there on the fence about the movie (and we'll admit the game could go anyway too at this point), it does seem like Traveller's Tales is trying to make a game out of the movie rather than the other way around. If the destruction and variety in various Transformers holds up, we could be looking at a game that might just avoid the licensed game curse. Might.