Iron Man Review

Anannya Sen’s Review

To quote another movie - what a piece of junk

Ok, I'm an Iron Man fan. But I guess you knew that because I used to read the comics and am looking forward to the film with great anticipation. Whether we'll get to see Rhodey as War Machine, or The Mandarin, or even Fin Fang Foom is another matter entirely. And no, I'm not making that last one up.

Early previews about the film are positive and it seems Jon Favreau is a fan. But I'm pretty sure he can't have had anything to do with this game. Unlike Iron Man's armour, quite frankly it's junk.

The graphics are distinctly 2D and you get the feel that these would have still been considered fairly average a couple of years ago. Granted, there are lots of nice colours, but that's about it for me on the graphics front. With Iron Man's stunning aerial capaibilities, all we get to see him do in this game is bank left or right. Yep, there's sound too, but not much more than one tune.

The controls are quite unresponsive, especially the stick. I've got a new K800i so hopefully things should move smoothly, but they didn't. I can't believe I'm about to say this, but it felt like flying around in a large chunk of metal. Clunky and slow, it can take a while to traverse any significant distance on the screen, even left to right. And Iron Man should have the aerial manoeuverability of someone like Neo in The Matrix, only Tony can do it with his eyes closed. And onboard computer of course.

Then we get onto the gameplay. It's a standard shoot em up with interludes between levels to explain the plot of the film. Iron Man has autofire so all you have to worry about is dodging the enemy blasts. This is easy at first, but gets harder. Never fear as there are power ups to be had which basically makes your blasts more powerful (duh) and gives you twin blasts as well. Apart from that there's the repulsor beam but you can only use this with 5 until the bar runs out and then you have to grab the lightning power up to replenish it again.

You would think that like any other standard shoot em up, the repulsor beam would act as a smart bomb and destroy everything on the screen so in moments of panic you can get some breathing space. But no, it just fires straight ahead and gets used up pretty quickly. Thankfully when you die, your power ups float around so collect them quick.

In addition to the game being the most basic shoot em up we've seen in quite a while, it only has four levels. That's right, four levels with a boss at the end. But don't worry, these seem easier than the main part of the game, and the firing patterns are certainly easy to avoid. Plus you have 3 lives which is more than enough to clock the game and get the final image of Iron Man flying. Was it worth it? Oh, and there's no difficulty level option as well, so it's not like you could play it again to give yourself more of a challenge.

I wonder how quickly this game was thrown together in order to be out in time for the film release? It also beggars the question of quality control for the developers as I think the only people who will seriously enjoy this game are those who are not yet in secondary school. If that's you and you're reading this, go ahead and get it, otherwise I would steer well clear of this one.

I didn't think we'd see this again, but it's got the dreaded wooden spoon award.