Iron Man

It's quite surprising that for Iron Man, one of the most boom-tastic of Marvel properties, it's taken them this long to turn out a blockbusting movie to wow audiences worldwide. It's not at all surprising however that the game-of-the-movie is a generic cash-in of the 'epic fail' variety.

In fact the whole game plays like it's been churned off the assembly line to meet a deadline that came far too soon. What's more dismaying is that it looks pretty sweet once you start the missions, but it all goes downhill almost straight away. The controls are clunky and don't work right, making flying an absolute nightmare; and the weapons are awkward and difficult to use effectively. So even if you master the cumbersome flying, you need to get past the faulty missile grabbing, horribly bad lock-on aiming, and the cripplingly slow underpowered guns.

Add this to the fact that every mission usually puts you up against swarms of enemies, who out gun and outnumber you massively, and you have a game that just ain't much fun. It's one thing to be challenged by an attacking force, but the designers obviously decided that the best way to make it interesting was to have enemies attack from every direction at once, leading to times when you'll fly into an area and drop dead out of the sky in seconds from attacks you can't possibly avoid. Even more infuriatingly, you can't stealthily pick off the bads as each mission gives you near-impossible time-based objectives to complete, or hundreds of the innocent will die!

Not that you'll really care, because the game's plot assumes you've already seen the movie and read the comics - so you get a wafer-thin version of the movie plot, but mangled horribly so it can throw more missions and villains at you, to the point where it just stops making much sense. That's pretty much from the off-set, as bizarrely the game doesn't even bother showing you how Tony Stark becomes Iron Man, instead throwing you into the action with a few throwaway lines and an ugly cutscene.

Bizarrely almost the entire cast of Hollywood A-listers have provided the voices for the game, which makes the plasticine-looking people in the CGI sequences all the more embarrassing. It's obvious that they tried to make them look a bit like the actors, but not enough to make it work, and not enough to stop the feeling that you're looking at something that's been thrown together for a cheap buck.

There really is very little to recommend you buying Iron Man. To be honest, even rabid fans of the comic or the movie won't get a kick out of being Tony Stark for more than the first 20 minutes. So do yourself a favour and enjoy something worthwhile and fulfilling. Like saving your money and going to see the film again instead.