Iron Man (DS) Review
The events following or prefixing a release of a major blockbuster picture is of second nature to gamers. Usually before or after the movie, we are treated with several different media tie-ins, including a video game adaptation. With the very recent release of the Iron Man motion picture, Sega have gone ahead and put out a somewhat disappointing adaptation of the film for all conceivable systems, including Nintendo’s DS. Although Iron Man is enjoyable for some short time, it is marred by several irritating design decisions.
Following the storyline of the movie, Iron Man places players in the role of Tony Stark, a wealthy industrialist who is at the forefront of weapons development in the United States. During a well publicised business venture to Afghanistan for business, Stark is kidnapped by extremist militants and placed in solitary confinement, being forced to build a missile most probably for use against the United States. Rather than build the missile, however, Stark builds himself an iron suit equipped with primitive flame throwers, and escapes the country. Upon returning to the US, Stark upgrades and improves his suit into what we all know and love as Iron Man today, and makes it a life goal to destroy the instruments of death that his company has created. Naturally, of course, Stark’s business partner opposes his decision and builds a suit for himself to stop him, creating a suitable rival for the player. Although the storyline of the film is included in the game, the developers have taken several liberties with the storyline, though most of the material comes from already existing content in the Iron Man universe.
Iron Man is less than impressive with it’s presentation. The menu and navigation are bland and lack any real eye catching stimuli. The game itself is presented in a full three dimensional world, and really shows the DS’ weakness in regards to generating good looking three dimensional objects. This can be said because Iron Man’s enemies as well as Iron Man himself look like jagged pixelated deformations. Enemies lack any real variety or personality and environments within the game, although kind of faithful to their source material are equally as bland. Couple such lack of design flair with a horrid frame rate at even the best of times, and Iron Man is a disappointing title visually.
Iron Man plays in a very simple manner, with all action occurring on the top screen of the DS and the HUD and schematics of Stark’s iron suit on the bottom. Players can interact with the suit in order to control Stark’s UniBeam, Missiles, Laser and other assorted weapons, all of which can be upgraded too. It’s a shame that the DS version of the game did not bring over the power assignment feature of the console versions, but being a much simpler game it can be excused. Generally movement is performed with the D-Pad while shooting is performed by simply touching the bottom screen on the DS. The direction Stark shoots in is relative to the position the stylus is placed on the touchscreen. Several other flashing buttons are assigned to Stark’s other weapons too, with a simple tap firing them. All things aside, Iron Man is essentially a three dimensional Geometry Wars but with a few extra weapons thrown in, and a three dimensional skin applied. Towards the end of each mission, Research Points are obtained which can then be exchanged for upgrades to Stark’s suit. Upgrades are useful most of the time as they increase fire rate of weapons, recharge rate as well as increases the flying speed of Stark’s suit. A major problem comes with certain upgrades being ridiculously overpowered and being available early on in the game, making it too much of a cake walk for anyone who wants a challenge.
The biggest problem with Iron Man’s prehistoric gameplay is that there isn’t a whole lot of variation. Many of the objectives consists of going to Point A, destroying Radar Tower B, and then going back to Point A to destroy Radar Tower C. There simply isn’t enough variation and too much repeated tasks for the game to be fun. It is a shame too, as the abilities of Stark and his suit lends itself to some pretty wild moments if thought about. With a meagre amount of missions too, Iron Man doesn’t offer a lot of replay value outside of getting all the upgrades, and that’s something only keen completionists would be interested in.
In general, the soundtrack of Iron Man is probably it’s selling point (if one buys DS games for such a reason, yes). The music has been lifted straight from the film’s soundtrack which is quite surprising for a game of this calibre, and a nice departure from the standard MIDI quality fare that even some first party Nintendo titles are released with these days. Many of the cut scenes in Iron Man take the form of static images adopted from the movie, with fully voiced tracks accompanying them. Yes, you heard right, fully voiced tracks. The voices are all taken from their original portraying actors from the film making Iron Man a pretty well pulled together project, especially for a handheld title.
All in all, Iron Man had a lot of potential considering its protagonist, but unfortunately fell flat due to boring, uninteresting and repetitive gameplay. The environments are boring, the gameplay even more so, but the soundtrack is brilliant and probably one of the game’s saving graces, lending an epic feeling to the events unfolding in front of the player’s eyes. All that can be recommended over Iron Man DS is perhaps to buy a ticket to the film itself, where you’ll get all the action of the game but without the frustration and you’ll save money too.
