Iron Man (PS3)

Tony Stark's Iron Man suit may shine bright, but his new videogame is a tad rusty.
5/13/2008 2:31 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Even if you try to play it smart by going around and taking out as many enemies as possible before focusing on your main goal, your work ends up being for naught when the next objective appears. Now, having a new group of tanks and choppers show up is one thing, but when you spend 10 minutes wiping out every gun turret on the map, how can more suddenly pop into existence after you blow up a specific building? Figuring out how to overpower challenging foes is fun, but simply being overwhelmed by multiple (and unlimited) cheap enemies that stand in one spot and blindly blast you the second you enter their range blows.

Not helping matters is the slightly-too-complicated-for-their-own-good controls. Despite the tutorial levels, don't expect to master Stark's armor until you've played a few more missions. Iron Man can perform a ton of moves, but they all require some pretty fancy fingerwork on the ole controller. Pull L2 halfway to hover in place; pull it all the way to rise straight up. Push L1 to fly forward; hold X while flying to fly faster with your afterburners. See a missile coming at you while flying? QUICK! Tap Circle to grab it and toss it back. Be sure to use the right analog stick to aim where you want the missile to go. And that's not even getting to the suit's weaponry systems. Imagine trying to keep all that straight while you're attempting to strafe around legions of firing tanks and duck behind mountains to let your suit's energy recharge. It can be rather confusing.

Occasionally, however, when you reach a rare lull in the battle, you discover that simply flying around and blasting enemies can be fun. During a few moments in the game, you can hover around a base, raining down destructive laser death on the bad guys before hitting the afterburners and leaving their burnt-out vehicles in the dust. It's a satisfying feeling that really sells the power of the Iron Man suit, but moments like these happen far too seldom here.

One feature that seems like it would muddle up the controls is the ability to reroute the suit's power. By tapping a direction on the d-pad, you can send more "power" to the suit's life support, melee, thrusters or weapons. This will boost your health recovery, punching power, flight speed or repulsor strength, respectively. You may not bother with this feature at first as you'll be too busy getting the basic controls down, but once you get adjusted to hitting the proper button to reflect your current battle situation, it adds a fun element to the fights.

Iron Man deserves some credit for getting some of the film's actors to reprise their roles. Luckily, Robert Downey, Jr. reprises his role as Tony Stark, but Terrence Howard (Lt. Colonel Rhodes) and Shaun Toub (Yinsen) also make appearances. Of course, their presence also makes the absence of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges all the more obvious. Not helping matters is the somewhat bland performances that the actors give. You can almost see Robert Downey, Jr. looking at his watch in the recording studio as he's reading his lines. The voices don't seem any better when they're coming out of the horrible CG representations of the actors.

Aside from the main story mode, there is another mode dubbed One Man Army that allows you to earn new Iron Man suits. Despite the unlockable goodies, this mode is frightfully boring. You're just tossed into one of the game maps where you have a set amount of time to kill a certain number of enemies. Comic book junkies will be interested to hear that the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions each have an exclusive suit of armor to unlock. The PS3 version sports the Ultimate Iron Man armor, and the 360 has the Silver Centurion suit.