Iron Man 2 Review

By Christian Donlan Published 30 April, 2010

Marks out of tin.

Version tested: PlayStation 3

There's a decent game lurking somewhere in Marvel's superhero, Iron Man. Maybe it's even a brilliant game. Sure, those palm-mounted laser cannons mean that he's going to enter most battles with his hands up, looking like he's dead set on capitulating, but he can fly, he can blast stuff into pieces, and he's made of bright, shining Metroid metal. Best of all, Iron Man's both weighty and lithe, capable of dropping out of the sky and busting open paving slabs before dancing out of the way of tracer fire and barrel-rolling into the distance.

Iron Man 2 will show you isolated moments of the character's potential, but not that many. SEGA Studios San Francisco, the team that made Tony Stark's latest movie tie-in, has already been closed down following the game's completion, and you can almost sense that external crisis intruding into the safe world of this blockbuster license. There's been a clear effort to make Iron Man work, but there's a lingering air of misery to proceedings, too: a feeling that the developers knew that it was P45s rather than DLC lurking beyond that last milestone.

In many ways, Iron Man 2 is an admirable endeavour. As ever, it has its fair share of indicators that it was rushed to meet a movie release date - there's plenty of texture pop-in, enemy animations are basic, and collision detection leaves gaps between melee attacks that Evel Knievel might have liked to try jumping - but there's a lot of effort on display, too. The story, kicking off after the end of the film by the looks of it, isn't that bad; missions show a willingness to mix up your objectives from time to time; and there's a generous upgrade system available in between levels.

SEGA's got the basics of the character right, too. Iron Man juggles ranged and melee combat relatively smoothly and there's total freedom as to whether you float through levels on your jets or run around on foot. While the control mappings for flight are a bit of a muddle, that's not the developer's fault. With weapons hogging the triggers and targeting lodged on the bumpers, there's nowhere else for your pitch control to hang out other than the face buttons, really. It's a little bit awful at first, and never becomes truly comfortable, but as with that rock climber who got his arm stuck between two boulders and had to, like, cut it off with his penknife before he starved to death, it's hard to see what else Studios San Francisco could have done given the circumstances.

1

Don Cheadle voices War Machine, which sounds like a coup until you go to IMDB and realise he was in a Golden Girls spin-off.

Besides, a far bigger problem is that, beyond the basics of character control, the whole thing is faintly drab. Environments are large but blandly decorated and filled with nasty textures, muddlesome menus take too much of the pleasure out of deciding whether to spend your upgrade points on researching new weapons or learning additional combos, and combat, while never frustrating, lacks the necessary weight and connection to make it genuinely enjoyable.

No weight: that's a problem when you're making a game about a man who likes to dress in metal. Iron Man and War Machine (you can almost always choose which character to play before each mission, and deciding whether you want a basis in energy bolts or machine guns and rockets is one of the game's more entertaining choices) may look the part, but they waft around like they're made of cardboard.

When they're knocked out of the sky, there's no hint of impact, and when they switch from hovering to rocketing through the clouds you'll struggle to feel any real sense of movement. Missiles and lasers chew through your robotic adversaries with no bite, and melee combat doesn't carry any sense of force at all. I've rarely had so little fun punching helicopters to pieces, and punching helicopters to pieces is something I can almost always count on to cheer me up.

There are a few good ideas - in theory, there's plenty of entertainment to be had juggling weapon recharges, switching combat stances, and unlocking new suits to wear - but there's no energy to the game's battlefields, no exciting variations in the enemies you're facing, and, before you know it, the missions have descended into irritating waypoint trudges. Regardless of whether you're searching the area, escorting SHIELD choppers on attack runs or destroying Tesla Cores, all you're ever really up to is following a tiny little yellow box on your HUD and looking for the way out.

Oddly enough, it's only during the cut-scenes that you'll get hints that the developers had any fun at all with this one. Iron Man 2's story may not have changed my life in too many ways - not the way, say, Outpost Kaloki X did - but it's told with plenty of chirpy exchanges of witticisms and the odd decent performance. It captures the pleasant glibness of the comics and movies, if not their sense of spectacle.

2

Upgrading stuff is almost always fun, and some of the later weapons are pretty entertaining. It's all a bit of a faff, however.

In all fairness, however, I should probably add that the human characters are so strangely modelled they look like the kind of mechanical horrors concocted to entertain desensitised French avante gardistes of the early 20th century after the laudanum had worn off. Tony Stark is closer to Mitsuhirato, the sinister Japanese villain from Tintin book The Blue Lotus, than he is to Robert Downey Jr; Pepper Potts has taken a terminal trip through the jowlinator and emerges resembling the kind of woman who might, one day, turn up married to Prince Andrew; and Black Widow looks like Amy Winehouse and delivers lines in a manner that suggests she whiled away her time in the green room by striking her forehead repeatedly against a sink.

But those are entertaining slips, really. Iron Man 2's ultimate crime is that it simply never makes you feel like you're a lithe metal wrecking ball, saving the world with one impromptu plan after the other. There's no room for tactics in between the waypoints and there are no opportunities for rogue moments of excitement as you take out each new arrangement of weightless foes. SEGA's just about fulfilled its brief - pick up Iron Man 2 and you'll probably get all the way through it - but there's not much pleasure to it, and the lingering sensation is of having seen the work of a defeated development team who were never given a proper chance to do anything interesting.

So, yes, there's definitely a decent game lurking somewhere in Iron Man, but we haven't seen it yet. This one isn't a disaster, but it can be a rather bleak experience.

5 / 10

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy
Picture of Christian.

About Christian Donlan

Chris Donlan writes about games for Eurogamer and some magazines. His heroes include Eugene Jarvis, Errol Morris, and Linus Van Pelt.

Read more articles from Christian by visiting the Christian Donlan archive page.

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Comments (49) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • towser #1 2 years ago

    Not seeing a score - is it that bad?! :-)

  • elephant_stone #2 2 years ago

    where's the SCORE?!

    whaaaaaa'?

  • steve1979 #3 2 years ago

    As there's no score i'll make my own based on the review. 6/10

  • telboy007 #4 2 years ago

    5/10

  • Vroom #5 2 years ago

    Brave new world? No score!

  • tiredoldandy #6 2 years ago

    Shit no score how will I cope? Maybe I'll have to actually read the review? NOOOOOOO...

  • Paperghost #7 2 years ago

    this game gets six rob liefields out of ten.

  • steve1979 #8 2 years ago

    ah 5/10, i was so close too.

  • Oli Verified Reviews Editor, Eurogamer.net #9 2 years ago

    Apologies, it was an input error. Fixed.

  • j-bo #10 2 years ago

    move-tie-in-in-crock-of-shit-shocker

  • wizlon #11 2 years ago

    But would it be better if it had a dog in it?

  • mingster #12 2 years ago

    The studio being shut down before its even come out just about says it all really.

  • Trigga_Tybalt #13 2 years ago

    Post deleted at 15:43:01 23-02-2012

  • Beano #14 2 years ago

    Surprise. Again.

  • TeaFiend #15 2 years ago

    Turns out the embargo on reviews until this afternoon was not suspect at all.

  • Psi #16 2 years ago

    they went and changed actors, confusing! Warmachine looks different! nooooo hope he doesn't have a shit cockney accent.

  • SAMagic #17 2 years ago

    Shame - Iron Man is one of my favourite super heroes and I saw an interview with one of the team who said they recognised the huge flaws in the first IM game and were determined to do better. Guess not.

  • Kerome #18 2 years ago

    I'm beginning to suspect that games based on movies are intentionally bad...

  • BOBBYLUPO #19 2 years ago

    "Pepper Potts has taken a terminal trip through the jowlinator and emerges resembling the kind of woman who might, one day, turn up married to Prince Andrew"

    Made me LOL.

    I saw the film last night and was really disappointed. Mickey Rourke is one of the best things in it, and considering he spends most if the time sitting about playing with bits of metal, you know you're in trouble. Shame, as part 1 was really enjoyable.

  • The-Bodybuilder #20 2 years ago

    This is current sega. I can't believe a few years ago, they thought this kind of strategy would aid them into becoming the 3rd best publishers in the world.
    Now they're just a no-nothing publisher(bar yakuza); yu-suzuki in retirement (probably stewing over the fact the world rejected his dream game), their main devs that aided them during the innavating dreamcast saga have been re-assimilated and merged into oblivion. And now, barring the rare gems, just make cheap movie and olympic tie-ins (no other good sports game since they let go of 2K), and sonic & mario rehash.

    /rant off.

  • Kafeen #21 2 years ago

    Hope its better than the first one, that was aweful.

  • M_of_the_sys #22 2 years ago

    Would be better if it had jet packs! Oh wait...

  • Madafunkola #23 2 years ago

    @Psi
    Rumour is that Terrance Howard demanded too much money (he was the highest paid in the 1st one!) so they booted him and got the budget Cheadle.

  • Lobosolitario #24 2 years ago

    Now imagine what the Crackdown team could have done with this IP...

  • subtlesnake #25 2 years ago

    "Shame - Iron Man is one of my favourite super heroes and I saw an interview with one of the team who said they recognised the huge flaws in the first IM game and were determined to do better. Guess not."

    Well, the review seems a lot more positive this time around, and the game scored 2 points higher (3/10 - 5/10). Really, I think getting a 6 for this sort of game would have been a big achievement on the devs part, given that these titles are essentially developed to be shovelware. Has there been a single good movie tie-in game?

  • Dr.Mott #26 2 years ago

    King Kong wasn't too shabby either.

  • dllord #27 2 years ago

    Ive got IM2 on the ipnone its not too bad i think!

  • spiritsnake #28 2 years ago

    ive never bought or never will buy a movie tie-in game.ever.

  • Muddtallica #29 2 years ago

    Many, many points to EG for citing Mitsuhirato in this review. He should be used as a frame of reference more often.

  • TRUTH #30 2 years ago

    The movie is getting pretty shit to average scores!...and it's got a long borrrrrrrrrrrring section in the middle that just drags.

  • Lunatic4ever #31 2 years ago

    Too bad...would love to see a decent iron man game.
    well,at least BATMAN managed to be awesome!
    Cant wait for the sequel. I want it to be dark,gritty and evil!

  • Bagpuss #32 2 years ago

    It must be soul destroying for the coders who make these kind of games...

    Leave university full of hope to be the next big thing in video games......and they end up doing stuff like this, sitting in some anonymous Grey cubicle thinking you could be having more fun writing a new database routine...

  • Slipstream #33 2 years ago

    It's a shame, Iron man should be one more fun movie to games transition since there is so much to work with. It does seem like they're getting there though, even if is in baby steps -_-

  • finexi #34 2 years ago

    shit game.

  • SEVQA #35 2 years ago

    Iron Man 2 , more like tin foil biatch 2!

  • Korpers #36 2 years ago

    Spares or repairs...

  • felastica #37 2 years ago

    Actually Scarlet Johanssen sounds that way in the movie too.

  • paulf #38 2 years ago

    crap game of a crap film

  • coolbritannia #39 2 years ago

    The film is awesome, very much in the spirit of the first, and war machine rocks.

  • youhavenomail #40 2 years ago

    On Newsnight Review last night they claimed films like Iron Man 2 are now made with the videogame tie-in in mind. It's funny how, although this appears to be true when you're watching a lot of recent blockbusters, the tie-in games always turn out to be throwaway shit.

    The exception, of course, is The Dark Knight. We got an amazing Batman movie and we got an amazing unrelated Batman game in Arkham Asylum. Iron Man 2 the movie is like a shit videogame. Iron Man 2 the videogame is like a shit videogame. At least get one right!

  • NBAoz #41 2 years ago

    I have the game and have been playing the past few days. It is WAY better than the first Iron Man game for those who are wondering, but that is not saying much as the first one was worth about 2 out of 10 IMO. If you are a fan of Iron Man and like action games you will probably find some enjoyment here. I also thought that X-Men Origins Wolverine the game was quite good and that got a bad review too, so don't let this review put you off. Go try it for yourself. You might be pleasantly surprised.... I give it 6 out of 10 so far.
    Edited by NBAoz at 01/05/10 @ 11:56

  • The-Bodybuilder #42 2 years ago

    @tachikoma

    I also specifically said "bar the rare gems".
    These games are the exception, especially in comparison to the dreamcast days. Sega is a shadow of itself, the old sega would've never made a movie-tie in like this.

  • SlackMaster #43 2 years ago

    I thought Marvel where not going to make any more shit game?

  • darkmorgado #44 2 years ago

    It must be soul destroying working on realistic generic dull games like this.

    Yep, because a multi-billionnaire who creates a hi-tech body suit complete with jetpacks, lasers and miniature rocket launchers, and uses it run around fighting crime and beating the shit out of super-villains is REALLY realistic, isn't it?

  • trip919 #45 2 years ago

    Another turd, another day.

  • Cherub007 #46 2 years ago

    Bayonetta, Football Manager, Total War. Three reasons modern Sega still do it for me. (I will add that not fucking up an existing, successful series is a skill in itself nowadays.)

  • muscleblade #47 2 years ago

    The Bodybuilder has a good point so does the ones saying its a decent amount of great SEGA titles.
    The poblem really is that for every great Sega game released there is at least 2-3 crappy ones.

  • drxym #48 2 years ago

    I can understand why the first game was poor. SEGA bids to the rights to some crappy summer movie, pushes out the usual shovelware and then is shocked that the movie does so well. No excuse for the sequel though, especially given how miserable the first game was.

  • raymondrayenz #49 2 years ago

    The film itself is fantastic, but the disc could use some work ... If you geniuses on a PS3 Paramount To make you see the movie before you download content BDLive decided to death "because of the Blue Ring". So basically, it's not an error, it deserves a feature! If you wait long enough, it is clear and you will be able to play the movie. Unfortunately, I'm sure if their numbers are still severs (not sure if can handle the new # 1 movie on the east coast at 1800 with a loooong download time =). The second option myself B-ray movies PS3 (BRM under option to turn internet connection during the test) is. You download it and (for the film right just download it later at a better time) will allow to leave.

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