Iron Man User Reviews (PS3)

Storm
from Brooklyn, NY, USA

Jun 1, 2008

THE GOOD:

Alright attempt at a Plot

Iron Man's suits

Voice actors from the film

Some Customization

THE BAD:

Laughable missions

Cutscenes off-point

Music

Very short

No replay value

Controls

Repetitive

Difficulty

SUMMARY:

Couldn't quite get a decent box art of the PS3 version. But it's the same as the PS2's, both in-game and out.

Terrible, absolutely terrible. ShadowJ hit the nail on the head with this one. The pro reviewers were too generous with their score. Ok, enough bashing, let's get into it's problems.

The game starts off alright, not really following the film but we get to make use of the Mach I suit. There's even a 'boss' towards the end at the desert. Iron man's capabilities are shown off a bit, but not quite at it's full potential until we hit the next mission. We get a chance to get used to the Mach II and Mach III suits flight abilities in second mission, but after that...everything goes downhill. A group known as AIM (stands for something, but I can't remember what, I don't care to remember) comes in, attempting to attack Stark Enterprise. Iron Man is there at the scene, and jumps into action.

Get used to those enemies, as they'll pop up for the rest of the missions. Warjets, guys flying around with laser guns, hundreds of thousands of rockets being fired, oh what fun for Iron Man. My question is this: Just how the hell did they get so many rockets and weaponry? I swear, so many are shot at Iron Man throughout the game it's like there's enough to destroy not only Earth, but the rest of the planets revolving around the Sun as well.

To make matters worse, there's not many things you can do with Iron Man. You'll see yourself using L2 and Triangle for repulsors against rockets and using missles of your own...but that's about it. You can grab enemies and vehicles to rip them apart, but that does no good if there's too many in the area. Unibeam takes too long to take advantage of, as well, powerful but not good enough with a missle or laser hitting you every 30 seconds.

The game attempts to be customizable, giving us the option of choosing more thruster power or more maneuverability, perhaps more speed or agility, there's suit upgrades to match our settings. There's also a balanced set, but it fees like the previous balance sets, so no use there.

Ten Ring Army. They have an infinite amount of missles, rockets, and laser blasts to take down the wonderfully designed Iron Man.

There's four modes/stances that you can switch from in-game using the d-pad. It will give you a boost in whichever you choose, whether it be Life Support (best one to keep it on), Melee, Weapons, or Thrusters. Only one's useful, and that's Life Support. It helps regenerate your health quicker...and with 4 missiles coming at you every minute, you'll want to be ready.

Dodging is a nifty feature, though it's quite useless. It's likely just there for show, watching Iron Man barrel roll and such...yet you still get hit. Flying is fun at first, but a few missions later you'll find yourself being frustrated for zig-zagging across the map to try and complete objectives.

As far as the graphics go, the lighting is very well done, and the characters portrayal shows effort, but the overall look to the game isn't very next-gen. It's likely that the PS2 version was just copied off for the PS3/360 versions. Iron Man looks amazing, as well, but he's the only one that stands out in battle. The buildings and such don't look as spectacular.

The game, like most movie adaptations, is quite short, so that's to be expected, but there's just no fun there. As far as the cutscenes go, it's also well done, up until the point where you notice that the characters mouths aren't matching what they are saying at all. It's great that RDJ, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges provided their voices, but the developers failed to capture the lip movement correctly.

Now I was under the impression that the Iron Man film was a family-friendly movie, one where kids can get into. The game is a completely different story, however. I had a difficult time trying to get through the missions, there's just too much to do, such as protect multiple facilities, and then, as explained there's about 100,000 rockets being fired around each mission. I'm not joking. There's not enough resources in the world for that many.

If you manage to complete the objectives, you're treated with a boss battle, and they aren't a walk in the park. Most bosses can also regenerate health, but better than you, and usually can go into hiding for it. It wouldn't be so tough if they were all you had to focus on. Unfortunately, enemies continue to spawn and come to assist the bosses to take you out. You do get about 2-4 lives in a mission, where Iron Man reboots, but that can come and go in no time, especially if you get depleted in an enemy base.

The plot is a decent one had the gameplay played a better role. The plot involves AIM, an organization fighting to persuade Tony to change his mind again (he decided to stop distributing powerful weapons in the film, as they were being used to harm the innocent). Iron Man stops their plans, but they don't give up. The game is also extremely repetitive. Iron Man has to defend and protect something that AIM is after, which doesn't go so well due to the man enemies that show up.

Also, maybe it was technical issues on my part, but my PS3 has frozed too many times when playing this game. It's never frozen on any game besides this one, I don't know if it's related to the game, but it does piss me off. It usually happened when a cutscene was about to play during the mission.

As for the good points...there's the mode, One Man Army. It's not too hard to beat, and you get a variety of suits to play with, which is quite fun, but not enough for me to recommend this game. 1.4/5 for me. I'm sorry Secret Level, but you need to try harder.