It's so easy to be disappointed with a superhero videogame. They always start off with such great potential. After all, who wouldn't want to play as some dude who can fly around and punch other dudes through walls? The problem is, superhero games very rarely live up to our expectations. Sure, every now and again you get a good game along the lines of Superman 2 or Marvel Ultimate Alliance, but more often than not, you end up with a Batman: Dark Tomorrow or Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The problem stems from the fact that it's tough to design a game around an exceptionally powerful and nigh invulnerable protagonist and the sad truth that most licensed games are terrible. What does it say about the genre that one of the games that best recreates the feel of being a superhero isn't even a superhero game? Yeah, we're talkin' about you, Crackdown.

Still, hopes were high for Iron Man, which is of course based on the new (and quite awesome) movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. The prospect of climbing into Tony Stark's legendary armor to do a little fighting and smiting with repulsor rays is just too tempting. Unfortunately, it isn't long before you realize that this game's a bit more Fantastic 4 than it is Ultimate Alliance.

The game begins with a couple introductory levels that help ease you into the suit's powers. The first stage has you wearing the Mark I armor while escaping from your captors in Afghanistan. Here you learn the basics of moving and using simple attacks. Stage two places you in the Mark II armor for a brief test flight that leads to a conflict where you must master Iron Man's palm-mounted repulsor weapons. From there, it's into the Mark III armor and the real game begins. Like many movie-based games, Iron Man expands on the film's story by introducing characters and situations not seen on the big screen. In addition to tackling the foes from the movie, you'll also face comic characters like Whiplash and Titanium Man and evil organizations like the Maggia crime syndicate and Advanced Idea Mechanics.

Within each stage, you're given a variety of different goals to accomplish. These tend to rapidly change, and you'll sometimes have to stop something that you're working on to go tackle something more pressing. These are usually secondary goals that don't necessarily need to be completed to clear the stage, but doing so will earn you bonus points afterwards (which can be used to upgrade your armor). Additionally, if you skip or fail these secondary missions, you'll also have to listen to your artificial intelligence buddy, Jarvis, or your friend, Lt. Colonel Rhodes, tell you how many innocent civilians died because you didn't stop that missile from launching. Way to go, hero.

A big problem with the missions is that most of their goals ultimately break down to "fly to this location and shoot the target until we give you another target." To spice things up, the developers decided to populate the fairly dull landscapes with swarms of cheap, respawning enemies. There are two main classes of enemies: airborne (mostly helicopters and jets) and ground troops (tanks and gun turrets and whatnot). No matter which group you decide to face, you're constantly being pelted with bullets and missiles. Want to escape a battalion of tanks by taking to the air? Too bad! As soon as you fly a few yards off the ground, you're suddenly surrounded by choppers lobbing missiles at you. Iron Man has the ability to catch missiles and toss them back at his attackers, but while he's grabbing one projectile, two more are exploding on his back.

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.

Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game run equally well (that is to say, slightly choppy). The PS3 version looks a bit nicer than the somewhat washed out 360 version, but given the relatively ugly graphics, this isn't much of a big deal. Only the most devoted "Iron Man" fan will get any enjoyment out of this title, and even then they'd be forcing it. You'd be better off saving your money for the eventual Blu-ray release of the movie.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game purchased by Crispy Gamer.