Reviews// Iron Man 2

Of course, all that would be forgiveable if it played well. Unfortunately, it doesn't. I've never been a massive fan of flight-based games, but Dark Void (while not amazing) won me over somewhat. While full flight (as opposed to hovering) is possible in IM2, however, in practical terms it's not a very big part of gameplay.

Most of your enemies, when airborne, tend to hover and cluster in certain areas, meaning that if you blast along in full horizontal flight, you'll tend to zoom past them and find yourself shooting into thin air.

That means, then, that you tend to have to hover and shoot. Although the control system is easy enough to grasp for this (and it could have been fiddly and awful) there's little finesse to these shooter elements.

Because you're in the sky, there's little cover. Also because you're in the sky, it's tricky to get a decent bead on your foes unaided. Thoughtfully, you're provided with an auto-targeting mechanic. This, of course, removes the necessity of you developing any skill or accuracy from proceedings.

Don't want to auto-aim? You will. The manual aiming system is horribly fiddly and you're unlikely to land a shot. So, back to auto-aim and you're left to spammily hammer away at the fire buttons; moving around randomly to avoid inbound flak. It gets worse, using auto-aim to switch between targets is cumbersome - you can't always select the target you want to!

You can also hammer enemies with melee attacks but, because you're hanging in mid-air most of the time and the camera tracking is pretty awful, this also defaults to spammy button-mashing.

There's also too much HUD, or at least too little thought's gone into the design. Your radar shows you where you're getting shot from but there's so much going on with the screen that I rarely noticed it.

Bosses offer little variety, mostly consisting of enemies of varying size and armour density that just shoot at you.

A weapons research and development system gives the appearance of depth and customisation. But the effects of said research feel fairly negligible - largely due to the fact that there's little strategy in your weapons use.

It's not all utterly terrible. You can, as you'd expect, unlock different armours to use, which is nice if you're an Iron Man fan.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, Invincible Iron Man writer Matt Fraction was brought in for writing duties so the script's decent and the plot's not terrible. There are, however, perhaps a few too many cutscenes.

Conclusion: The basic premise behind the game isn't bad. Flight-based shooter combat wrapped around a great IP. It's just sloppy in too many different ways. If you want to extend the film experience, go read some comics. If you want an airborne third-person combat game, give Dark Void a go. If you want a good superhero title, try the now-in-three-dimensions Batman: Arkham Asylum. If you're really dead-set on playing a mindless shooter with Iron Man in it... well, go nuts. But wait until Iron Man 2's reached its third week of release and retailers have realised they have to knock the price down if they want to free up some shelf space.

SPOnG Score: 53%