Iron Man (PSP)

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One feature that seems like it would muddle up the controls is the ability to reroute the suit's power. By tapping left and right on the d-pad, you can send more "power" to the suit's armor and propulsion. This boosts your health recovery and flight speed, respectively. You can also boost your weapons, which activates the extremely powerful Unibeam cannon. 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: Robert Downey, Jr. (Tony Stark), Terrence Howard (Lt. Colonel Rhodes) and Shaun Toub (Yinsen) all make appearances. Of course, their presence also makes the absence of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges all the more obvious. Not helping matters are 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.

As mentioned before, the version of Iron Man is essentially identical to the Wii version, which is an entirely different game than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, complete with a different developer. Although the graphics aren't very impressive, they do look a bit nicer on the small screen. As a bonus, this PSP version sports a few mini-games that involve races where you fly through beacons or a contest to wipe out as many enemies as possible within a time limit. These games are about as exciting as they sound (that is, not very). The core gameplay is actually pretty good, certainly much better than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, but the awful controls on the PSP ruin it. That's a shame, too, as it knocked a perfectly serviceable game down into "avoid" territory.

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