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Review

Iron Man (various)

Monday, 12 May 2008 13:43
Avoid this game at all costs
If you had to come up with one word to describe game tie-ins from popular, blockbuster movies, would it be “stellar”, “amazing”, “wonderful” or “fantastic”?

Or would your first thoughts be more likely to include the words “dire”, “abominable”, “loathsome”, “despicable” and “rotten”? I think I know which set of words you’d choose.

Yes, Iron Man, the hit game (it will sell a lot, no matter how bad the reviews are) of the hit movie of the hit comic book and so on. Of course, after playing it, you might want to add an S before “hit game”.

The film’s plot is present and correct, with Robert Downey Jr and Terrance Howard reprising their cinematic roles. That is where any semblance of quality disappears, with little to no lip-synching in evidence, for example.

Gameplay-wise, there is very little to recommend here. If you found this on one of those budget title carousels in Staples, you still wouldn’t think it was worth the money. Despite the relative niftiness of your suit, with its multiple powers, traversing the identikit levels isn’t my idea of thrilling entertainment.

Respawning enemies abound in these linear yawn-fests, wave after wave taking you on, getting blown up, then being replaced by their clone brethren. Use your repulsor rays, secondary explosive weapons or chest-mounted unibeam – the results are the same, pretty much.

You earn money by completing objectives, though why this is deemed necessary is never explained – your character is supposed to be a billionaire, so why he needs to earn money to upgrade the suit, we’ll never know. When you have a game built to a template like Iron Man, it is just a case of putting the ideas in, not in thinking about them.

The controls are pretty terrible, making even simple movements a painful, joyless bore. Fighting involves the ubiquitous “take all skill out of the game” lock-on system so beloved by console games. Hold the right trigger down all the way and you auto-target an enemy, firing repulsors at it. Keep doing this and, when it is destroyed, you automatically move on to the next … and the next … and, well, you get the idea.

The only time this “tactic” doesn’t work is when you come up against the big boss man encounters, where your trusty repulsors suddenly do no damage at all. You’d be better off sneaking round behind them and stuffing a banana up their exhaust (not a euphemism), like Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Gaming cliché rears its noxious, pus-dripping head once more, as the bosses are miles more difficult to defeat than their slightly smaller grunts.

At the end of the day, I’d rather have battery acid poured over my genitals than play this game again. Avoid.

2/10

Joseph Powell

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