Iron Man (Xbox 360)

The enemies in Iron Man come at you thick and fast, respawning constantly with fresh air, ground and footsoldiers when you blink enough to be able to take in the fairly detailed graphics on the Iron Man armour alone. You’re never given a breather and the objectives fly up on screen along with stupid timers for sub-objectives that could net you more cash, so rather than enjoying the view and having fun blasting the enemies in your supposedly next-generation kick-ass Iron Man tech-armour of the gods, you’re stuck watching Stark get beaten down by wave after wave of enemies and resulting to cheap tricks to deal with them.

You can catch missiles in mid-flight (tricky to time), you can grapple in combat, grapple vehicles to do a variety of things like break them, use them against your foes and if you can do it (grappling fighter jets is really tricky) hurling jets out of the sky towards the ground. Boss fights are troublesome at best, they’re usually relegated to trading repulsor and vespid missile shots from a long distance since Tony’s health depletes rapidly when struck even on the easiest difficulty level (and you only have four reboots) sending you plummeting to the ground until you reboot the Iron Man armour.

The game’s levels are huge, open and sprawling, but they’re also sparse and unimaginative with bland textures and the supposed power of next-gen systems feels hardly used. It seems that all the details have been put into the Iron Man armour itself and everything else has a low-res and bland texture on it. In the cut-scenes, Tony’s chest light looks like a bizarre stuck-on T-Shirt pattern that could have easily said: Go Sox than emulated the glowing white power-source that gives Iron Man his trademark circular uni-beam built into his chest-plate.

There are problems with lip synching and the textures look plastic at times in the cut-scenes. The actors deliver their dialogue well enough, but it’s easy to tell that they’re not putting as much oomph into their performances, due to the shoddy script and terrible story. It does nothing to bring new fans in and only serves to annoy Iron Man fans in general, like me. What could have been a great experience and a revolutionary movie game for a superb character turns into a clunky chore that plows on through endless levels of the same-old-same-old punctuated by boss fights and swarms of respawing enemy half-wits.

There’s some replay value, since you can unlock Iron Man armours by beating a 10 minute timer and slaughtering 80 enemies in One Man Army mode. All the armours are pre-configured and come with a variety of abilities that are as wimpy as they are uninspired. The stealth option of the Extremis armour is a great idea, but lasts for about 3 seconds if that. The Hulk Buster armour can let you pick up and throw heavier vehicles, but by then you’re probably just unlocking armours and doing the whole thing for gamerscore because you’ve realised it’s better than sitting, twiddling your thumbs – well – it’s not, go out and play something else, really, trust me, your thumbs will thank you.

One day we’ll have a decent movie tie-in game, until then, we’re stuck with half-assed attempts at cashing in on popular fan-boy related icons like Iron Man and if this game manages sales it’s only because it’s actually got Iron Man in it and the fanboys are obsessing over it, ignoring the faults that turn it into a clunk fest because you know, it’s IRON MAN! Personally, I’ll go see the movie again thanks.