punched a tank into the stratosphere, and downed a helicopter by throwing its own missile back at it. I walked through a hail of lasers unscathed, and destroyed a mile-long flying fortress with a hail of my own. These extraordinary feats personify Iron Man as an unstoppable one-man army, but moreover highlight the only moments of destructive joy this game delivers. The remainder is a superhero-sized train wreck, a disaster even by movie game standards. The experience is so defeating and depressing it could lead to gamers using Tony Stark’s coping methods of drowning their sorrows in a bottomless bottle of scotch.
If you were to strap balsa wood wings onto the Titanic, I’m convinced that it would fly more gracefully than Iron Man does in this game. His movements are jerky, the sensation of flying hardly feels realistic, and the controls are the very definition of unintuitive. Most of my time in the air was spent bouncing uncontrollably off of the terrain and man-made structures.
When Iron Man isn’t doing his best impersonation of a drunken human pinball, he’s vomiting all over the art of combat. With his targeting system providing a range not even suitable for skeet shooting and his laser packing a punch similar to the children’s game Laser Tag, Iron Man consistently gets his ass handed to him by lowly Abrams tanks. His suit plays a large role in his combat ineptitude. It always runs out of power, like it’s using half-drained batteries from a TV remote control.
Tony’s assignment for each level is to locate colored blips on his radar and annihilate them. Most of these conflicts are lengthy and devoid of much needed checkpoints. While I would like to say that most of the frustrating death I experienced revolved around Tony’s inability to fly, target, and shoot, most of my visits to the reaper were caused by the aggressive enemy AI. I don’t think I’ve ever seen enemies spawn this quickly and in such unfair locations. Moments where I wasn’t getting riddled with gunfire from multiple vectors and from enemies I couldn’t even see were few and far between. Even if I did locate them, they could hit me, but my targeting system couldn’t get a lock on them.
Needless to say, I played this entire game tense, angry, and praying that the next level would be the last. I never really felt like I was in control at any point during the game. The summer movie games usually bring misery, but I never expected them to bring this much pain.