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Iron Man 2: The Video Game

Iron Man 2: The Video Game

Iron Man suffers yet another horrible video game. What would Tony Stark say if he was here to see this mess of a licensed game?

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Tony Stark may be one of the smartest comic book heroes of all time, a brilliant inventor and business man, who controls every single part of his business empire. I'm sure he would be crying rivers of blood if he ever stumbled upon Iron Man 2: The Video Game.

Let's start off with the controls. What's it like being Iron Man? Not, very good. One of the best things about Iron Man is that man and suit are not the one and the same. If the suit malfunctions the man is in trouble, and as some kind of bizarre salute to this fact Sega have managed to botch the controls to such an extent that the suit never does what it's supposed to. I wonder if anyone even bothered to beta test this as my thumbs attempt to dance a jig over the controller in my attempt to steer, aim, fly and reload.

Because no one wants to see Iron Man on the ground, do they? In the air Iron Man handles, not as if over the limit for driving under the influence, but closer to acute alcohol intoxication. More like George of the Jungle than Iron Man.

Customisation is something that every game seems to have these days and it's something that is being pushed hard in Iron Man 2: The Video Game. Between missions you can customise your suit with generators, weapons and ammunition. There is a rather decent amount of options, even if its hard to overview and it gives off an unfinished feel. Too bad your choices don't really make much of a difference as pretty much all battles amount to strafing around your enemies and pressing every button until they die. Rinse and repeat for a few hours and you have finished the 8 missions that make up the game.

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Almost all missions are variations on the theme: Fly here, defend this, fly there, defend that. The mission design is so broken I have to check and make sure the disc itself isn't broken. For one thing you're not supposed to leave what you are defending, thus your enemies can pick you apart from a distance.

It is as if Iron Man 2: The Video Game has walked into the minefield that is movie licenses and stepped on every mine. Targeting works whenever it wants to, and mostly not at all. The check points are also sometimes in the right place, but sometimes they are as meaning as a quick save in front of an exploding grenade. The list of faults just goes on and on.

From a graphical standpoint it seems all efforts have gone into making the suits of Iron Man and War Machine as shiny as possible. As for the rest of the game it consists mostly of brown wastes, landscapes void of details and identical concrete bunkers. The cutscenes stutter and the framerate is irregular at best. The soundscape is made out of hollow sounding weapons and a Lamb of God track caught on repeat.

The story doesn't have much in common with the film apart from using the same characters. And Robert Downey Jr only lends his appearance to the game as some hopeless voice imitator does a terrible job of reproducing his voice. The story is written by Iron Man vet Matt Fraction, who hopefully doesn't get any more jobs after this mess of a script. It's so poorly written, vague and unbearable, that it makes my ears tear to think that someone has actually been paid to write this. The only saving grace is the freakishly detail techno chatter that makes up the dialogue.

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You only have as much fun as you allow yourself and to fly head first into a building and watch as the ugly graphics try and depict the collapse of said building is some kind of entertainment. Of the ironic kind. The same can be said of Iron Man's most powerful attack that sees him opening the front of his suit and resemble some kind of wrestler robot who enjoys home decoration and helicopters. That's also entertaining. But tragic.

Iron Man 2: The Video Game is a game that is an embarrassment to licensed games. To think that the results would be this bad, when it's the second try is almost unforgivable. But I suppose the team knew what they had coming (Sega closed down the studio upon completion of the game). Most licensed game are plagued by the fact that they are rushed onto the market and not given enough time in development. Iron Man 2: The Video Game, shows no such signs and it just appears as if no one even tried to make a good game.

Iron Man 2: The Video GameIron Man 2: The Video GameIron Man 2: The Video GameIron Man 2: The Video Game
03 Gamereactor UK
3 / 10
+
Enjoyable techno-chatter.
-
Broken controls, horrible story, ugly visuals, uninspired game design, campaign lacks content, repetitive mission design, not fun.
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

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