I write this review as a warning, so more poor souls do not have to go through this for a measly gamerscore boost. That is the only reason to even think about playing this game. If you are not into achievements, do not ever play this. Do not buy this for you kid, unless you hate him/her very much.
Did you find the first Ben 10: Omniverse a tolerable, kiddie beat-em-up for a pretty painless gamerscore boost? Forget everything about that game, High Voltage Software brings you this painful mess, which is a complete waste of DVD usage and the low production costs, it's only usage is to get destroyed or unlock you a few achievements, then get destroyed. Or if you borrowed the game, return it to the owner and let them destroy the game, it's their resposibility for getting this game. Or if you rented this, tell the renting service to destroy this and remove it from their selection.
Ok, you have Ben 10 with his multiple alien personas, his mission is to... be stuck in endless rail running sequences with constant barricades, which you have to evade by either choosing a light, medium or heavy alien-type with the d-pad and let them handle the obstacles based on their abilities. Lots of times you won't have enough time to change to the right form, which results in loss of Omniverse energy. If you lose all your energy, you turn back to Ben and... he dies in one hit even on the easiest difficulty. Guess what happens when you die? You respawn close so it's painless to continue playing? No! Whenever you die, you respawn back to the beginning room of the level. Every time. No exceptions. Through the entire game.
One of the biggest brainfarts of the game is that Ben can't change back to his human form to recharge Omniverse energy. You have to wait until it's depleted and those moments are really rare, since you are only save from getting killed only about 5% of gameplay time! The remainder of the gameplay not spend on rail running sequences are the combat arenas, where you endlessly spam buttons to defeat the enemies. Your only way to recharge energy is after the combat arena, you are free to breath... and wait until the energy depletes, so you can turn back to Ben and wait again to recharge the energy... automatically changing back to alien form. There is no control over it! You are forced to take a bite of the developers turd-sandwich, due to lazy and weak gameplay design.
What serves you more annoyance is that if you run out of energy midway through a rail running sequence, Ben will instanly die when he hits an obstacle. You can't do anything about that, except hope to recharge as much energy as possible from the combat arenas. Yeah, there are energy barrels, but the only way to break them is to choose a heavy alien type. Then, you have to change back to your preferred character. The heavy aliens and about half of the alien types are worthless in this game, except Cannonbolt and the blue ice alien. The heavy aliens move extremely slow in rail running, making them more worthless. The light alien is the only one capable of fast running and making the pain a bit more tolerable. But the barricade obstacle courses force you to use the other, slower aliens types. The heavy aliens other than Cannonbolt are unusable in combat. Their attacks are so slow, so they will not connect most of the time, because the small mobs have very quick attacks. There are also flamethrower and laser turrets and you can get stuck as the flames burn you with no possibility of counter attacks for some alien forms.
When you get hit by the obstacles, you take energy damage and you fade off the screen for a while. But you can't control when you respawn back, so you get hit by the next barricade, because you have no time to react, taking more hits. The sluggish controls do their best to make this as frustrating as possible. Then, the game gets hard. Level 6, oh boy. You have to select the right alien types at the right time and choose your rail running tracks wisely, otherwise you are stuck in an endless loop of rail running. You will spend some time trial-and-erroring through the loop, no way to go backwards, no ways to control movement speed, no remorse. That is until you loose all your energy, turn back to Ben 10, get hit by an obstacle, die and return back to the beginning of the level. Does this sound like fun to you?
You will unlock shortcuts, so it won't take as long to get back where you died, and you do not need to repeat the finished combat sequences. Thank you, developers, you had mercy. But it repeats itself through the whole game. The game lasts about 2 hours on the easiest difficulty but is doubled on the hardest setting. The extra time comes from you thinking all the better things you could be doing with your time, like gluing your feet to the ceiling and acting like a bat in a cave. You need to play it on the hardest difficulty if you want 1000g. The highest difficulty achievement is only 20g, so you will save a lot of pain if you decide the 1000g isn't worth it.
There are only about 10 minutes or less of cutscenes, half of them are in the same room basically, lipsyncing is off, the usual stuff. Graphics are okay, the same kinda cell-shaded style that the first game had, it looks like a 360-game, but that barely helps or eases your anger, as there are only about 3 different level layouts each filled with the same rail running and combat.
Only other gameplay mode is the arena mode. Guess what, more boring button smashing in a 15 wave horde mode! Did they bother to carry over the character upgrades, which you worked hard for, when you picked up the collectibles? No! All your characters start from level 1, every arena. You have to pick up the upgrade bonuses again as a wave finishing bonus... What were they thinking?
As a summary, this game is very bad. The other Ben 10 games feel like masterpieces compared to this mess.
.5