Iron Man

Several months ago, Marvel Studios made a movie of one of my favorite super heroes. Naturally, the game based on the movie based on the comic-book followed. Iron Man the game went largely ignored by the gaming media, but soon after the movie came out there were free demos of the game available for download on the Xbox 360. I recently bought a used copy, played it and returned it in a week. This was not, however, because the game was not a good game.

One of the important things we rate games on now are their length and repeatability. It seems to be part of the equation involved in getting one's money's worth. I don't know where the dollar/hour ratio lies, but Iron Man just doesn't deliver there. In a joint effort, my roommate and I beat the game on all difficulties and gained all the Xbox achievements in a week while still taking care of the daily preparations needed for classes. Neither of us have vast amounts of free time. This just isn't a very deep game. I completely upgraded my suit as high as possible with three levels to go on my first play-through and it hardly seemed to make any difference at all.

That said, I highly recommend renting Iron Man because there is some fun gameplay there. It may not last very long, but I would rank catching my first jet out of midair right up there with rolling up my first human in Katamari Damacy. There's just something incredibly satisfying about grabbing a plane going super-mach speeds and flinging it into a mountain. The flying, once used to, is very simple to work and soon the player will find him/herself zipping around between bases blowing the crap out of tanks and S.A.M. launchers.

The story is weak, but not even I was playing this game for the story. I got the story from the movie and I learned all I needed to know about Tony Stark from the comics. The game's story is basically what the movie's would have been had they had a few more hours to kill. After Tony confronts the Ten Rings in the village, he goes on to attack other militant organizations around the world weather they use his guns or not. The story is kinda lame, and the voice acting isn't much better, but the cutscenes are short and skippable so the story doesn't get in the way of what you're really here for: blowing the hell out of everything with a gun strapped onto it (and some things without). There were only a few moments of mid-level dialogue that made me cringe, but I was over it pretty quickly after allowing myself be distracted by a pretty-colored mushroom-cloud.

Rent Iron Man. It's worth the seven bucks it would cost to rent the thing and you can play it, enjoy it, and beat it in the week you'd have it for and when you return it with a smile on your face, you know that you got a great gaming experience for a few days on the cheap and now you can focus your attention and your money on a better game.

Next week, I'll probably have finished the Force Unleashed, so there's something to look forward to.

Thanks for reading,
Zac