Iron Man

Houston…

Graphics – that’s the first noticeable problem with Iron Man and, if we’re honest, the graphics are really, really awful.

Now, over the bank holiday weekend I actually saw a copy of Iron Man for the Nintendo Wii in my local independent games retailer. I picked the game up, toying with the idea of taking it home to get a headstart on this review and indulging my comic-book geek.

I didn’t pick the game up though because, even looking at the back of the box where images had possibly been tweaked and updated, the graphics were blurry and gross. I put the game down and looked forward to playing the Xbox 360 version when I got back to the office, confident that the graphics would be better on the more powerful system.

Alas, no.

Even on the Xbox 360 version, the game looks awful. Cutscenes are low-res, blurry and awfully lip-synched. Gywenth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts does look vaguely like her, but the way her face tries to animate when she talks makes her look more like a drunken Angel fish blowing a kiss than a gorgeous redhead.


And don’t even get me started on the Robert Downey Jr. likeness. He looks more like Rorscarch than Iron Man.

In game, the graphics aren’t much better and from the off it’s clear that there are several things that are limiting the game. Enemies seem to have only one, preset death animation and the enemies themselves are incredibly bland and samey.

It’s always the same – hundreds of identical grunts who all grip their bellies, fall to their knees and slump on the floor when they are shot with a flamethrower. No smoke, no burns, they just all look they’ve taken a slug in the gut and fall down like dominoes – whum, whum, whum.

Things don’t get much better when you try to take on larger enemies, though if there is one credit we’d give Iron Man then it’s the fact that it has a fairly wide range of enemies, even if they do have identical AI and behaviour. There are helicopters, tanks, turrets, SAM launchers, infantry, jets and so on. Fighting against them is rarely much fun, but at least misery has plenty of company.


The levels themselves are fairly boring and bland too. The city-based levels and urban landscapes are completely unpopulated and barren, though there are at least abandoned cars that serve almost no purpose at all. The plentiful skyscrapers don’t do wonders for the game’s complete and utter lack of anti-aliasing either.

The box makes some big and bold claims about the open-ended battlefields that let you wage war in your own way too, but this is frankly a little bit of an exaggeration. If you promise open-ended battlefields to players then what springs to mind is something like Grand Theft Auto or Hitman, where locations are expansive and players can use a number of different routes and tactics.

Iron Man doesn’t really offer that. Instead, most of the time what happens is that you’re dumped in a mostly empty level and told to destroy a number of different, but very samey objectives. Destroy the tank at one end of the level, take out the tank at the other end of the level, kill the helicopter in the middle and then blow-up the tank that comes out as a boss fight.

I suppose, yes, it is technically open-ended in that you can usually take down the objectives in any order you want – but when the objectives are more or less identical and you’re fenced in to the area by invisible walls anyway then it doesn’t make a huge difference.