Well, that’s another hope dashed. It’s okay, it wasn’t a very big hope and not one we were pining anything to, it was just a vague sort of “hope this is good” kind of hope. A beaming wide-eyed face of hope plastered on to mask the inevitable disappointment that there are still no decent superhero games to play, let alone a film-licensed one.

Ah well. It’s just so easy to fall from the hype though when you’re watching videos of Iron Man being awesome, plucking missiles out of the air and throwing them back at the enemies, or when he’s boosting all around the place soaring like a red and gold eagle thing. Which is all well and good when you’re just watching it but once you get your hands on the controls, Iron Man turns into Duffman, or maybe even Drunk Man, and falls flat on his shiny metal ass.

You’re eased in to it slightly though as the first level has you running around on foot in the first Iron Man suit Tony Stark makes while being held hostage. It’s odd that you can’t actually fly, and if you don’t ‘know’ Iron Man you could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this version of the suit can’t actually fly. Well, why else would the game make you run friggin’ miles on foot when there should be a faster option. But in a cut-scene right at the end of the level, Iron Man just fires up his boots and flies away. Buh uh? He could fly the whole time! You’d almost feel cheated if it wasn’t for the fact the controls are damn awful.

The lack of flying in the first level does another thing, other than bemuse, it lets you see just how rubbish the rest of the game will be. Punching people is no fun. Iron Man just sticks his arm out and people go flying. Sure it shows how powerful he is but there’s no impact or feeling that what you’ve done has crushed any bones.

Obviously, this being Iron Man he has a good few other attacks. Repulsor beams fire from his hands, missiles shoot from somewhere else and then there’s the Uni Beam that shoots out from his chest. And since Tony Stark is covered in computer stuff he gets big, massive targeting reticules that completely cover the enemy and makes it difficult to see what you’re shooting. Eventually you give up trying to work out what’s exploding and just start seeing everything as the reticule and you end up firing away until all the colourful targets are gone.

How you do that is up to you but we found that just constantly firing the Repulsor blasts works the best. The missiles are a bit of a joke, they take ages to recharge and need careful targeting, but the worst thing is that by the time they actually hit their target you’ve already destroyed it with the repulsor beam. This makes them pretty damn pointless. The Uni Beam isn’t much better, for example if you’re hit while charging it you’ll be forced to start all over again.

And then there’s the throws and special moves you can do with B. If you hold B down then you can throw the human enemies resulting in a little cut-scene that takes a lot longer to view than if you’d just shot them from far away. Iron Man can rip vehicles and gun emplacements apart to destroy them, also with B and then a heck of lot more B. You get the sheer anti-fun of hammering on B as Iron Man strains and struggles to rip off a tank’s turret. B, B, B, B, B, B... not, fun, not fun, not fun. It goes on too long and you feel like you’ve been pressing B for much longer than you should. Sometimes you’ll come across a tank that you can use to your supposed advantage. Before destroying it Iron Man can somehow fire off a few shots from the almost decommissioned tank, but by the time you have noticed you could have been using it to blow up some other enemies it’s gone and run out of ammo.

The whole throwing missiles thing is also broken. The timing on it is practically impossible to get right and when so many missiles are flying towards you it becomes another B mash-fest to catch a missile and target it at something before Iron Man chucks it away. This is intensely irritating when some bosses don’t give a damn about what you’re shooting at them, but then their energy bar drops like a stone if you manage to hit them with their own missiles. Stupid game.

Tim Empey