skipping in opening credits
choppy load screen
clean start menu, macro shot of iron man' s suit
Iron man looks clean, solid animations
crosshairs suck
explosions are poor,
IRON MAN
After some promising screens, and a sweet looking video this morning, the bar was set relatively high for me for SEGA' s Iron Man game, despite being a movie tie-in. After a short download, I finally got to sink my teeth into a ten minute portion of the upcoming game.
Premise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_(film) Plot (Demo Specific)
You are Iron Man. A voice akin to a homosexual Jude Law instructs you to destroy a military base, and it' s subsequent weapons caches in the desert. It doesn' t get much more straightforward than that. From the looks of it, Iron Man is going to be light on plot, heavy on action, not that we expected anything else.
Controls
Iron Man' s controls are simple, but functional. The left triggers are used to toggle and control the hover and fly actions. The D-pad assigns what part of your suit you want to divert the most power to (flying, meelee, weapons etc). The analog sticks control your motion and camera. Right trigger fires your primary weapon, and the face buttons meelee, secondary weapon, dodge, and special move.
Graphics
I really did try to get the best of the game out of the way first, because the graphics are where things start to look grim for the title. Iron Man himself looks pretty enough, sporting a relatively wide range of animations, a shiny looking suit of armor, and a handful of special weapons, all clippling along fine at a solid framerate. The downside is that the rest of the title is totally forgettable and uninspired. The textures on the terrain and buildings are flat. The buildings themselves are simply scattered about the map, with no real thought for placement, or gameplay at all for that matter. It' s as if somebody took a map editor, and threw around a few square concrete buildings, a turret or two, and called it a day. The few enemy character models present are laughable. The entire game would look lovely if you backed the camera 100 feet upwards, and turned it into a RTS, but as it stands, it looks like an upscaled Xbox game, nowhere near indicative of the screens that were released.
Oh, yeah, and the crosshair sucks! It' s not that important in the end, but it' s like hands in an FPS. If I' m going to be staring at something the entire time I play, it should at least look decent!
Gameplay
Iron Man at it' s core is a third person shooter. It' s not a particularly good shooter, but the gameplay mechanic they employ (my usage of mechanic in the singular is fully intentional) is not flawed. The problem with Iron Man rests in the repitition of that singular gameplay element. The demo was only ten minutes long, but I saw all I needed to see in less than five. Go blow up a soldier, tank, helicopter or gun, all of which may as well have had no means of defense, for the little damage they do to you. The only things I ever bothered to watch out for were rockets, which I had to intentionally fly towards to finally hit me.
Bottom line, my attention wasn' t even held for half the demo, no less half a mission. Bad news.
Sound
Totally average movie-game fare.
Conclusion
Iron Man will appeal to the most rabid of Marvel fans, and the most ignorant of consumers, but if there' s anything to enjoy in Iron Man, it' s flying around doing nothing... and you can get that jones out in the demo. I' d avoid it like the plague.
I didn' t bother editing this. There' s probably tons of spelling mistakes, and a bunch of notes in it, but it' s really not worth my time or trouble.