System: XBox 360
Score: 5.5
Iron Man is unfortunately just like most other movie-hero games; it’s extremely disappointing and very lame. First of all, without ever seeing the movie, the game doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It starts off with Stark randomly held hostage in a cave with no explanation given. After a short cut scene in which Stark takes a mask from a pit of fire, you end up dressed in a giant suit of armor and are told to escape from this desert facility by shooting all of your enemies with missiles and fire. That pretty much sums up the entire game; watch random cut scenes which hardly tell a story, and run (or later fly) around and shoot your enemies, which can be people, tanks, or helicopters.
Regardless of which type of enemy you’re fighting, none of them are very impressive but instead look bland and ugly, as do the environments that you play in. When you’re trying to get through a level, all that you have to worry about shooting are things with orange circles around them; everything else is optional. This makes it so that you don’t even have to pay attention to what you’re attacking, all that you have to do is be sure that its circle is orange and you’ll eventually make it through the level.
The game’s story itself probably would make more sense if you watch the movie before playing it, however that is ridiculous because for a game to have any merit, it shouldn’t rely on an outside source to tell its story, but instead should be able to present a coherent story itself. Iron Man fails to do that, and to make matters worse doesn’t even bother to use scenes from the movie as its cut scenes. Instead, it uses poorly animated graphics which resemble the characters from the movie.
With today’s technology, it’s common knowledge that words are expected to match up with characters’ mouth movements, however during some of the cut scenes, the mouth movements are so far off from the words that it is laughable, until you remember that you dropped about $60 on this game. Overall this game is a huge disappointment and a total waste of money. The game itself is ugly, repetitive, boring and offers very little story. If you want to enjoy Iron Man, watch the movie and forget about the game.
