Iron Man (Wii)

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You'll most likely have the controls mastered after the first two stages, and you'll soon discover that simply flying around and blasting enemies can be fun. During 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.

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 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) also 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.

It's worth noting that despite many similar gameplay elements, the Wii version of Iron Man is an entirely different game than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, complete with a different developer. Although it's certainly doesn't look as nice as those versions (which aren't very pretty to begin with), it's actually the better game. The controls are much more intuitive, and the enemies aren't nearly as cheap. Iron Man certainly isn't a great game, but if you enjoyed the movie, it makes for a decent weekend rental so that you can relive Tony Stark's big-screen adventure.

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