Iron Man 2 (Shaken not stirred)

Platform: Playstation 3 , Playstation Portable , Wii , Xbox 360
Price: $29.99 (PSP), $49.95 (Wii), $59.95 (PS3, 360)

Iron Man 2 seems like it's the "perfect storm" of crappy movie tie-in videogames. Not only is it a movie tie-in game, it's the follow up to the original tie-in game, which was also pretty bad. Not only that, but it probably didn't help development when the studio making the game gets shut down. Playing through the game, I got the feeling that they were trying to make a good game, but ran out of either time or money or both.

If you were worried about spoiling the movie by playing the game first, don't be. The plot of the game is totally different from the movie and seems to take place sometime after. Penned by the current Iron Man comic writer, Matt Fraction, you play through 9 missions basically trying to retrieve stolen Starktech. (By the way, at one point in the game there's a malevolent weather machine... something which also appears in Fraction's Free Comic Book Day Iron Man comic. Did a monsoon ruin his birthday party or something?)

For the most part, you can choose either Iron Man or War Machine to run through the various missions, although some missions require you to be one character or the other. And in addition to those two characters, you can also unlock different armors that comic fans would be familiar with, like the classic Iron Man costume, the Ultimate Iron Man armor and the more recent Extremis armor. But the difference is primarily cosmetic and has no bearing on the gameplay.

You do, however, get to upgrade your weapons throughout the game by spending "research data" accumulated by doing well on the missions. You can swap out your weapons between missions and even the type of ammunition that it fires. It's an interesting way to capture the "inventor" aspect of the character, but the navigation menus are a bit confusing. Not only do you need to upgrade your weapons and ammo, but you'll also need to manually place them on your suit... but wait! Since there are number of different armors, you'll need to put them on the suit you're using for the mission! It's unnecessarily complex and confusing, especially when all you want to do is blow stuff up.

The controls are somewhat improved from the first game. Flying around is a little bit easier, but it's easy to get turned around and not go where you want to go. It doesn't help that the camera actively hates you. Way too often, the camera would get stuck in a place where I wouldn't be able to see where I was on screen or if I was actually fighting what I wanted to fight. The lock-on feature is supposed to help with targeting your enemies, but I found that it was more disorienting than helpful.

Before I get into what I think are the two worst offenders in Iron Man 2, I will say that having Don Cheadle and Samuel L Jackson reprise their roles in the game is a nice treat. The game's Robert Downey Jr soundalike is also pretty close, but kind of has the feel of someone doing an impression of Robert Downey Jr. doing Tony Stark.

But the best voice acting in the world couldn't help elevate the horrible graphics. Now, for the most part, I don't mention the graphics in these reviews because I feel like videogames have come to the point where stuff on the whole looks good. The only time I feel like I should mention the graphics is when they're really good/unique or they're really bad. The graphics here are really bad. I played the PS3 version of the game, but I might as well have been playing a PS2 version or even a PSP version. The textures are pixelated and muddy. The character models for Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle and Samuel L Jackson are soulless to the point where they appear to be zombie versions of the characters. (Now THAT would have been a better game...)

This last point could be good or bad depending on how you look at it... the game's length is ridiculously short. It was less than 24 hours between when I received the game to when I finished it. And it's not like I played a marathon session... no, I'd say it was three or four casual gaming sessions. All told, about 6 hours in length. Now, if you bought the game, that's probably a bad thing because that turns out to be about 10 bucks for an hour of entertainment. But considering how bad the rest of the game is, maybe the length is a blessing in disguise...

Rating

There's some good ideas in this game. Too bad those ideas are surrounded by crap. While the game's length makes it a perfect rental (does anyone do daily rentals?) there's nothing in the game that makes it worth however much a rental costs. This one is a "pass".

Recommendations

Iron Man - To get your Iron Man fix, just go watch the original movie.

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John Minion

John Minion, or Min for short, is the hardest working employee at GameBizCo Inc. Playing everything from Goombas to no name thugs, Min gets beat up on a daily basis but loves every minute of it. He always wanted to work in the gaming industry and was originally hired as an intern. After years of getting coffee, his big break came when someone called in sick... and the rest is history.
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