Iron Man has long been one of my favorite comic book characters. I distinctly remember getting my first ViewMaster (ya-know, the stereoscopic 3d gizmo with the little disks) when I was about 4. It came with an Avengers disk that pretty heavily featured Iron Man. I thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread. I'd always watched sword and sorcery type shows with my dad and though that a knight in shining armor who could blow $h!t up with his hands was the bees knees.



I was very excited to hear that Iron Man was getting his own movie. I was even more excited to find out that he was getting a video game. I suppose I should preface my actual review by saying that I only own a Nintendo Wii, so I can only review the Wii version of this game. I won't lie to you... the Wii version doesn't look as good as all those screenshots flying around of this game that look like they might have come straight from the movie, but it does look good. More importantly, it's fun to play. The controls are pretty good, at least as good as you could expect for a character with as many butt kicking options as Iron Man. You can switch from fighting on the ground to fighting in the air at any time, which is nice, and you have a pretty large array of weapons at your disposal and switching between them on the fly to take out different threats seems pretty natural.



Aiming is taken care of by simply aiming the Wii remote at the screen and then pullin the B trigger to fire. Moving you targeting reticule also skews the camera. I've had good and bad experiences with games that use this mechanic and thank you SEGA for including a sensitivity setting so that this can be adjusted. In this game it works well. By holding down the A button you fire Tony's afterburners and go from hovering flight to full on flying. Again, pretty good controls, Iron Man flys like a figher jet on crack and is very responsive, so responsive that it takes a little getting used to actually. Can't shoot in flight mode, but after a few upgrades you don't have to as you can just ram right through things at supersonic speeds. Did I mention that he's fast. He is, and it actually feels pretty fast too.

A simple game mechanic lets you shunt power between three suit sub-systems (armor, propulsion, and weapons) and doing so increases the power of one system while decreasing the other two. When power is shunted to weapons, for example, Tony switches from his normal repulsor beam hand cannons to his chest-mounted uni-beam, which requires a short charge-up but can take down a tank in two hits. It would have been nice for sega to give you the option of using charged up repulsors as well in this mode (mostly because the charge time for thr uni-beam requires you to stand perfectly still) but this is a small gripe.



The game does lack some in depth, it's pretty much a smash and shoot extravaganza, but it's still fun. All of the main cast from the movie lended voice talent and likeness to the game (though Robert Downey Jr. seems a little less than enthused at time). Some of the facial animation in cutscenes is nothing short of comical. Contextual actions like pulling the cannon off of a tank and beating it to death with it's own weapon or grapling onto a helicopter and ripping the tail off add some depth to the destructive options you have at your disposal, but, like I said, smash and shoot.

So, bottom line... if you like, love, or are contemplating marriage to Iron Man, then you will probably like this game. If you like mindlessly blowing things up in increasingly extravagant and colorful ways you will probably like this game. If you are looking for Grand Theft Auto in an Iron Man suit you are going to be dissappointed (OK, so I was a little dissapointed). While the game does offer open environments, it's a stretch to call this an open-world game (though it didn't stop SEGA from trying, right on the box), the environments here are nowhere near as expansive as the recent Spider-man or Hulk titles. The graphics are decent (trust me, it looks MUCH better in motion than in the screenshots I've used here).

If you can hold off until this one is available at a discount or used rate, then hold off. I couldn't though, and I'm not too upset that I didn't.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give Iron Man for Wii a solid 7.