Iron Man (Wii) Review

Iron Man (the movie) is currently faring quite well critically, as evidenced by its average rating of 78 on Metacritic. Unfortunately, as you're probably painfully aware, the quality of a film very rarely equates to the quality of its videogame counterparts, at least not when you want it to. We'll jump straight to the point and tell you that Iron Man is no exception. In fact, if it weren't for the pre-rendered cut-scenes featuring animated versions of the film's various actors, Iron Man would share almost nothing with its silver screen complement. The story has been significantly altered and the 'awesome' factor of seeing a man fly around in a metal suit firing lasers out of his hands is almost entirely diluted due to a number of oversights on the developer's part, which we'll get to shortly.

The game itself is split into around a dozen missions, each of which is preceded by one of the aforementioned cut-scenes. Unfortunately, none of these are particularly good at explaining what the heck is going on, nor at building any sort of emotional bonds between the characters and the player. The result is a rather sterile experience that boils down to simply shooting everything that moves and calling it a day. The developers have tried to spice things up by introducing some of Iron Man's better known nemesis' from the comics - Iron Monger and Titanium Man for example - but the end result leaves more than a little to be desired. Not only are said characters barely introduced before you're asked to pump them full of lead, but dispatching them is no more entertaining than the rest of the game's rather mundane encounters.

Mundane is quite a strong word, so let's clarify that. Within the scope of each level Iron Man can either run/hover or fly around while utilising his repulsor beam, gatling gun, and missile launcher to dispatch enemies. Movement is handled with the Nunchuk's analogue stick and aiming with the Wii Remote. It all works well enough for the most part, and boosting around at high speeds even feels pretty good, but it doesn't take long for the game to start showing its true colours. First of all, most levels are very small and the larger ones are extremely linear. Try and move outside of the area you're supposed to be in and you'll be greeted with an invisible wall and/or an audio message telling you to return to your objective. Of course, all games have to have boundaries, but these are simply too constricting. On more than one occasion we found ourselves attempting to strafe around enemies only to end up coming to a dead stop for no good reason.

The issue of lacklustre environments is further worsened by a frankly appalling draw distance, which the developers attempt to hide with sand storms, snow storms and fog (all of which are the same particle effect coloured differently). This would be less offensive if the parts of the level you could see were particularly attractive, but they're not. Iron Man's character model is decent, but enemy foot soldiers all look the same, vehicles are often indistinct, buildings are blocky and forgettable, and the overall colour scheme is just dreary. Not only does everything look rather boring, but most of it is completely non-interactive. Only an extremely small selection of objects can be destroyed, and everything else will simply take everything you throw at it without a scratch. You'd be hard pressed to tell that this game uses the Havok physics engine if its logo wasn't printed on the back of the box.

It's not that we're unaware of the Wii's hardware limitations, but other games have already proven that Nintendo's little white box can do much better than this in the right hands. Even looking past all the aforementioned issues, though, Iron Man still suffers from one unforgivable problem: it's really not that fun. There is nothing satisfying about killing a footsoldier in a single shot only to see him (or her) vanish with nary a death animation and re-appear out of nowhere moments later. Vehicles have the added bonus of context-sensitive finishing moves (such as destroying a tank with its own ripped-off turret), but because these are more time consuming than launching a couple of missiles, the novelty is likely to wear off rather quickly. Furthermore, despite certain enemies' reluctance to take damage from anything other than Iron Man's fists, melee attacks have been foolishly linked to the Wii Remote, which you may recall also controls the camera. We're sure you can imagine how well that works out...

The game's developers have tried to make things more interesting through the use of power distribution and upgrade systems for Iron Man's suit. The former allows players to divert power in order to enhance their armour, propulsion, or weapons. This might have been useful if the game was remotely challenging, but most of the time there is little incentive to tinker with these options making it something of a moot feature. The latter improves certain aspects of your suit depending on how often you utilise them. For example, if you spend a lot of your destroying enemies with rockets, you'll find your explosive arsenal improved after each mission. It's a nice touch, but by the time you've fully upgraded your system you will probably have finished the painfully short single-player mode, and there's very little incentive to play through again.