So there I was, on Xbox looking through my friends list and noticed that someone was playing the Iron Man demo. I was naturally curious, of course, having seen the trailers and laughed at something so silly. I’m not really a fan of Iron Man, nor am I the biggest Marvel fan — but I do know that when games get more media hype than player hype… it’s a recipe for destruction.
Well, I played the demo. I was right.
The major gamebreaker here is the undeniable obscurity presented all throughout. I started up the game and begun to play, and everything seemed fine. Little did I know, the air of obscurity was beginning to rear its ugly head. I was presented with some kind of upgrade system thing, all specializing in the different body areas (torso, legs, hands) that you could add to Iron Man; but seriously, this was all near utter uselessness, especially in a demo where the general public wouldn’t know which would be better, and which would be worse. Personally, I just didn’t bother dealing with that and skipped to the gameplay, but oh… it just kept coming.
The control scheme was really confusing and didn’t feel intuitive at all. At first, it didn’t seem all that bad, since I dropped down and started running to see how those mechanics worked out. I then, though, initiated flight and it felt so unintuitive that I had to waste my time adjusting to the flight controls. It was a system that used the left analog stick to direct your flight, which was fine, and you would expect then the right analog stick would be used to either a) direct your camera or b) direct your crosshair. Well, yeah, that would be the smart thing to do, but it wasn’t done; instead, you get an awkward camera push to the area you’re moving the analog stick to.
Other than those problems, the controls for combat were, if i may be so blunt, shitty. I’m sure there would be been more options, none of which I took advantage of because of the deplorable and overcomplicated control placement. So I switched that off to just move my crosshair near the target, semi-lock on, and shoot. That was it.
The graphics fell victim to a problem all but many games that incorporate flying have: it looks pretty nice while flying from afar, but when you get right up to it, it looks so bad. I understand that most games that are solely flying wouldn’t bother to apply detail and proportion to small buildings. But in this case, you will often find yourself getting on flat ground to ease the troublesome ’shooting-while-flying’ mechanism. So, what we have here is a studio that’s being forced to reach a deadline who can’t bother to tweak those little part of a game that make it shine. Sad.
It’s a shame. I see so much potential in this series (Iron Man, I meant… no sequels, please!) to create fantastic games that will utilize what can make this fun, and allow it to be fun and not suck a big floppy black one. It’s with a heavy heart that I say this game is just going to be another crappy game added to the pile of crappy games based on movies.
