Well here I am again, faced with another game based on a movie. I’m always full of hope that that it will be a well planned game rather than something rushed through the loose bowels of the development team. There have been a few success stories like the Thing, GoldenEye and I loved the Amiga’s interpretation of Tim Burton’s Batman.
But a common factor seems to be that most successful games are not released at the same time as their counterpart movie. This is certainly true of the Thing and GoldenEye.

So what hope does a movie titled game have when it is released a few days after the movie and when the branch of Sega developing the game is being closed down….apparently none.

This is not say the game doesn’t have its good points, the weapon customisation features are a nice addition to the game. This works by picking up data points by killing and destroying as much as possible through the missions.
The Missions are fairly standard, kill waves of bad guys for whatever reason then kill 1 or 2 big bad guys at some point during mission. On the upside unless decided by the mission you can choose between Iron Man and War Machine. Then there is an array of Starks other suits to collect and use.

Despite the fairly low rez graphics the enemy designs are pretty good, I like the giant bad guys.
At points you get some old school gameplay, you have to time your attacks on a big guy and develop your tactics to bring him down from there. But all of this is fairly simplistic and lacklustre.

As far the story is concerned the game has nothing to do with the movie, for me this is not a problem, in fact it has quite an interesting version of the origins of Ultimo.
But then I wonder if the game is going to have little more than the title and characters of the movie then why not take a bit more time over the game. Change the game’s title to something like “Iron Man 2:Ultimo” and make into a nice warm up release before the movie comes out.

Unfortunately the games bad points outweigh the good points.
One thing that really gets my goat is the ADHD targeting system, it’s fine when beating on the smaller guys as you just kick their asses like Iron Man should. But when we get to the bigger guys with hardpoints it drives me mad because I can’t get it to focus on just one place, you end up with a load of turrets still shooting the crap out of you just at half health. I know you can turn off auto aim, but all I want is something that I can use to manually cycle through targets.

The character graphics really suck in this game, ok they resemble their real life counterparts but they are lifeless and dull. The animation takes most of the blame here, but the models aren’t great in the first place.

What really cheapens this game is that there is only a single player mode, come on you have already allowed us to use War Machine so how hard would it have been to give us a co-op mode.

I don’t think anyone needs to buy this game to find out how mediocre it is, but if you don’t believe me Iron Man 2 is now cheap enough to make a mistake and give it a go.