If the past is any indication, it would take a real super-hero to break the trend of movie-based videogames sucking. And even though Iron Man has the ability to fly high into the sky, this game never gets it’s thrusters working and quickly nose dives into the ground. Scratch that, this thing hits the ground and burrows into the pits of videogame hell.
Tony Stark has faced some challenges in his day, but none as bad as going head-to-head with the gameplay of Iron Man the game. If the technological marvel that is the Iron Man suit really felt as cheap and light to Stark as it does in this game, I’m sure he would have scrapped it at conception, accepted his fate, and died. Sadly the weapons at your disposal are about as fun to use as the suit is to pilot. Nothing feels right. What should be a fun time as the famous billionaire super-hero is an exercise in frustration and boredom.
Instead of spending this entire review pounding in the idea of how bad this game is, I’ll cover the gameplay and let you in on why I was left feeling this way. Your first mission is a tutorial which involves your escape. How you were trapped in the first place is a secret only revealed to those who watched the movie. From the very beginning, things look bad. Despite being Iron Man, you’re grounded during the tutorial and can’t lift off. This wouldn’t be so bad except the first mission is so linear and boring; the tone put in place ruins any chance of the game itself actually getting off the ground later.
Now that the tutorial is out of the way, it’s time to get to the meat of the game. As Tony Stark, you’ve created an incredible weapon, but the problem is now you have to keep it out of the wrong hands. You’ll set out to do this initially using the Mark III suit. The controls of the suit are pretty convoluted, but I have to give Sega credit for attempting them. Unfortunately, they just didn’t succeed. You’ll use the left trigger to manage your elevation. Pressing the left trigger all the way down will rocket you skyward, while lightly holding it will allow you to hover in place. You’ll use the left thumb-stick to move Iron Man in any direction and the right-thumbstick to target your enemies. The A button provides boost in the direction you choose with the left thumb-stick. The B buttons is used like a reversal or defend option by allowing you to catch incoming missiles. Yes, there are some cool features. Well, they would be cool controls in a complete game.
You’ll earn upgrades for your various weapon systems, and can unlock some of the classic suits seen in the old comics. But as cool as you would think it is to fly around in classic suits, the boring gameplay ruins the fun of these suit variants for even the biggest Iron Man fan. Why is the gameplay so boring? Imagine flying around in vast open worlds. Sounds cool at first right? It’s not. Many people were worried about this when the first screenshots came out and we saw these huge open (and bland) landscapes. Those empty looking screenshots told us a lot more than we realized. The environments are huge, which is a plus. But they’re just so empty and void of fun that I can’t figure out why the developers wasted the time coding these large areas. While flying around it’s almost, at times, like the world died and you were the last survivor. There are no cars on the roads or signs of life for miles. That just doesn’t cut it in this age of gaming.
Graphically Iron Man does a poor job of representing the movies characters to which they’re meant to represent. Character models in Shenmue on the Dreamcast showed more life. The character animations seem almost robotic. The lack of expression from any of the characters just compounds the feeling that this game is empty. The suits and environments look good, but since there’s very little going on in this game world, it shouldn’t be hard for any machine to render beautiful suits.
The sound gives us actors from the movie phoning in some half-assed attempts at dialog that continue the trend of a hollow lifeless feel in this game. I could talk about explosions here, but the action is so minimal that the sound effects provided are few and far between. I’d have to scratch out a full paragraph about thruster sounds since that’s what you’ll hear most the time.
It’s a shame that such a bad game was made to accompany the stellar Iron Man movie. But then again, is anyone surprised? One only need look to Superman on the Nintendo 64 to see how hard it is to make a free-flying superhero game. While Iron Man doesn’t have the repetitive stupid rings to fly through, the linear gameplay does remind me of that terrible 90’s game. But this isn’t about bad superhero games. It’s about movie-based games. They rarely work. These games are on a different schedule than other titles. They have to be out by the movie’s release. We can blame the movie’s release, or we can blame the developer. But no matter who you blame, don’t buy this game. Go watch the movie and enjoy Tony Stark that way. A heart condition couldn’t stop Stark, but Sega sure did.
= The suits are amazing looking. But what happened to the rest of the game?
Tony Stark has faced some challenges in his day, but none as bad as going head-to-head with the gameplay of Iron Man the game. If the technological marvel that is the Iron Man suit really felt as cheap and light to Stark as it does in this game, I’m sure he would have scrapped it at conception, accepted his fate, and died. Sadly the weapons at your disposal are about as fun to use as the suit is to pilot. Nothing feels right. What should be a fun time as the famous billionaire super-hero is an exercise in frustration and boredom.
You’ll earn upgrades for your various weapon systems, and can unlock some of the classic suits seen in the old comics. But as cool as you would think it is to fly around in classic suits, the boring gameplay ruins the fun of these suit variants for even the biggest Iron Man fan. Why is the gameplay so boring? Imagine flying around in vast open worlds. Sounds cool at first right? It’s not. Many people were worried about this when the first screenshots came out and we saw these huge open (and bland) landscapes. Those empty looking screenshots told us a lot more than we realized. The environments are huge, which is a plus. But they’re just so empty and void of fun that I can’t figure out why the developers wasted the time coding these large areas. While flying around it’s almost, at times, like the world died and you were the last survivor. There are no cars on the roads or signs of life for miles. That just doesn’t cut it in this age of gaming.
The sound gives us actors from the movie phoning in some half-assed attempts at dialog that continue the trend of a hollow lifeless feel in this game. I could talk about explosions here, but the action is so minimal that the sound effects provided are few and far between. I’d have to scratch out a full paragraph about thruster sounds since that’s what you’ll hear most the time.
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