Iron Man

THE BAD:
Melee combat is atrocious. No real reason to not be in hover or flight mode at all times.

The sheer number of missiles homing in on you at one time make it frustrating to concentrate on your objectives, forcing you to dodge all over the place to stay alive.

Linear, Mission based gameplay instead of a sandbox style environment.

SUMMARY:
Fans of Iron Man have pretty much had to see their favorite superhero in a videogame as a side character up to this point. X-Men Legends II featured IM as an unlockable character and while his abilities were captured, it just didnt feel like he belonged. He played a similar role in Marvel's Ultimate Alliance where he could be used to team up with other characters in the Marvel Universe, but the premise was pretty much the same as in XML2, he was part of a team and not the star of the game.

At first glance, the demos and videos of Iron Man showed some promise and looked really good. But when you play the final version the game has its great moments, but then leaves much to be desired in others.


In the very first mission, the game just appears cheap. All the enemies look exactly alike, Iron Man sprints around the battlefield as if he carries no actual weight at all, and the very basic controls and graphics just seem like more effort could have been made. The explosions arent that great, and the flamethrower just makes enemies fall over instead of lighting them ablaze as you would expect.


Moving on in the game, the Mark I suit is introduced and the game's stock rises a lot here, introducing flight. The flight controls are really good and you can pull off dodging barrel rolls, fly by blastings, grapple enemy choppers in mid air, and generally fight as you would imagine Iron Man would fight.

After fighting off an assault of enemies in what looks to be a ghost city, we finally see the well known Mark III Iron Man suit in the third mission.

From here, the gameplay is pretty repetetive. Enter a mission area, blast everything you can while flying or hovering, and move to the next area. Defeat the boss at the end, rinse and repeat all the way through to the end. The game has certain objectives that need to be met for achievements, called Hero objectives, but if you fail them the game doesnt really do a whole lot to penalize you for it.

For instance one mission has you engaging american jet pilots who are attacking you and you can either shoot them down, or grab their jets to rip the canopy off and then angle the jet up into the air so that the pilot can eject safely. There is no cinematic difference either way which one you do.


The frustrating thing about this game is the number of missiles that come for you at a single time. Watching your radar, you will see it rapidly fill up with red dots that come after you. You can dodge some, use countermeasures on some if youve unlocked them, but ultimately youre going to get hammered by missiles all through this game. Playing on easy is the most enjoyable way to play this game, for the missiles dont have such devastating capability as they do on normal and hard and you can go through and kick ass like you would expect Iron Man to do. Other difficulties become more of a game of self preservation and life support management than really concentrating on doing cool stuff. Youre so worried about dodging that next missile that you cant really enjoy destroying a group of enemies.

Your suit is upgradeable with money you get from accomplishing objectives in the missions. These range from completing the mission in a set amount of time, destroying the target number of enemies, completing the hero objective, and finally simply finishing the mission itself. Its most profitable to go for hero objective, and enemies destroyed objectives first to get money to upgrade when you first start out. Then when you have superior armor, thrusters, and repulsors, come back and finish the mission under the time limits.


The game is pretty straightforward. You go from mission to mission, blast everything in the area, defeat a boss and go to the next mission. Side modes are unlocked in the one man army mode where you need to defeat 80 enemies in 10 minutes in each of the levels the game offers regular story missions in. These are easy enough once your armor is upgraded to maximum and you can unlock classic suits by completing each one of these.

The little replay value this game has is to use the classic suits that are pre-configured for you and you must use each suit's strengths and weaknesses to finish the missions. Other than that, there is very little replay value. Easy achievements can be had here by doing a few things in each of the suits. Defeat Iron Monger in the Silver Centurion suit for one achievement, simply grapple any enemy or vehicle with the Hulkbuster armor for another, defeat an enemy with a ground slam in the Extremis suit for another, Defeat Titanium Man in the Classic armor for yet another. Really quick, and easy achievement points on this game.


If youre a casual gamer, just rent this title. You can complete it in about 2-3 days and get just about all of the achievements that the game offers. The only difficult one is the Superhero achievement where you have to complete the game on hard difficulty. Hardcore Iron Man fans will like this game for the few moments it has that really captures what it is to be Iron Man.

For his first starring title, this isnt a bad start. Tone down the freaking missiles, and with a better ground combat system and maybe a few more auxillary weapon choices, along with a free roaming open world, the next Iron Man game could be a real hit.