M:B #4: Iron Man

There are certain games that I develop a morbid curiosity towards based on other people telling me how terrible said game is. Granted, most games put out are not going to be good, but at best will be average if not terrible. However, every once in a while I hear a terrible detail about a game that causes me to think to myself: "Well, guess what I'm going to end up playing at some point...." And such it was with Iron Man for the 360 and PS3. The game, while poorly regarded, wasn't the worst game of 2008. On metacritic.com, it has an pretty terrible 45%, but then again, I can think of several games that have gotten worse (Gods and Generals, for one). So the reviews alone weren't what sold me. It was a review from IGN.com regarding one of the later levels that sold me. The reviewer is talking about why he is giving the game a 3.2 and says:

"I needed to get in and destroy the bad guys along with a secondary objective of crushing some Prometheus rockets before they obliterated neighboring cities. However, anytime I stuck my head out to try and crush one of these missiles, I was flattened by the tanks, dropships, rocket launchers and seemingly hundreds of other men waiting to kill me."

Somehow, the idea of a game that punished you for trying to fly towards something with near instant death sounded like my cup of tea. Perhaps I took it as a challenge, perhaps I just wanted to torture myself. I still don't know after completing the game. But was the ride worth taking? Meh.

Iron Man is a pretty by the numbers bad game where one simple tactic seems to work for killing just about everything. All you need to do is hover around what you're shooting at and change your elevation slightly and you pretty much can kill anything. Perhaps what makes this game bad is the fact that this is the only tactic that works at all. Try to do fly-bys on what you want to destroy, and you're going to find yourself shot out of the sky in no time flat.  Try to charge up your unibeam to destroy something, and you're dead. Pretty much try anything but hovering and firing repulsor blasts/missiles and you're going to die. Now, granted you might be able to use simpler tactics on the first 3 levels or so, but after that, you need to be cheap. Except being cheap is the standard.

 The two main modes are Story mode and One Man Army. Story mode makes up a plot that incredibly loosely follows the movie, but to say even this is a stretch. It's more or less a bunch of missions strung together with different objectives, although most of the objectives are "Blow everything up at these 5 locations." One Man Army involves killing 80 enemies on different maps from Story mode, but the big draw here is that if you complete a mission, you unlock an Iron Man suit of armor from the comics, and they have quite a selection (from the classic Mark I to the Hulkbuster).

The graphics on the game are alright, although they only look like a really good XBox game. The game does run fairly smoothly overall, with very few framerate hiccups. The sound is alright, although the cutscenes are downright terrible. They feature much of the cast from the movie, and yet they look terrible and somehow sound worse. They would have probably been better off going the NES route and having text screens that just showed the dialogue between characters. Perhaps this would have allowed for more fine tuning of the actual game.

Overall, Iron Man did not inspire the type of rage I anticipated, as I never got really frustrated with the game because I made steady progress with it. I was a bit disappointed on all fronts because of this, and hence can't even really recommend Iron Man as a so-bad-it's-hilarious game. In general, I'd just say don't waste your time.