Consolation Prize

There’s been a raft of new demo’s recently appear on Xbox Live Marketplace and as usual I like to give most of them a go at some point. Knowing that there’s a new Iron Man movie around the corner I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to give the demo of the tie-in game a once over.

The demo is quite a short affair with only the one mission “Stark Weapons” to try out, and unfortunately it’s a fairly bland mission at that. The pretence here is that your former captors have stockpiled a cache of weapons thus providing the ideal opportunity for Tony Stark to try out the new power armour.

There are three difficulty levels to pick from with “formidable” accompanying the usual easy and normal difficulties. Once the desired difficulty is chosen you have the opportunity to configure your suit, upgrading or changing various components such as the your “Repulsors” or “Power Systems”.

Iron Man is initially quite complex to control with all the buttons having a purpose and there’s a little bit of a learning curve involved and until they’re second nature Iron Man will feel a bit ungainly. The flight controls felt especially awkward, requiring only minute adjustments, and once on the floor walking around things didn’t feel much better. The same can be said for the targeting system, being a bit too skittish, and on most occasions you just have to point in the general direction and let the automatic lock-on take over.

As mentioned previously the mission doesn’t showcase the game to the best of its abilities and is simply a straightforward fly from point A, destroy any opposition, destroy weapons cache, fly to point B, rinse and repeat affair. Not only are the objectives very formulaic but there’s not much eye candy on offer in this demo either. Iron Man himself is excellent as you’d expect being the primary character but the enemy opposition wasn’t very memorable, just some tanks, gun turrets, and helicopter gunships. In addition the environment is a sparse rocky / desert environment with some structures, again is forgettable, and doesn’t jump out at you and make you take notice.

On a positive note the voice dubbing for Iron Man and his dialog with
Jarvis is quite well done and the suit configuration is a good element that should come into its own in the full game. Negatively this looks like just another average movie tie-in game that may appeal to fans of the movie but really Iron Man deserves something better.

I like it enough that I plan to rent it at least. Flying was fun.