Iron Man 2
Review
Iron Meh
by Keaton Arksey
reviewed on WII
Steel yourself
Iron Man 2 has not been the most warmly received superhero game in recent memory. In fact we gave the 360 and PS3 versions of the game a 5.0 as the graphics, sound, and gameplay were a complete mess. So what are the chances that the Wii version could be superior? As it turns out, fairly likely. That doesn’t mean that it is that much better than its HD relatives though.
Depending on how you felt about the movie, you will either be happy or disappointed to hear that Iron Man 2: The Video Game has little to nothing to do with it. The game begins after the events of the movie as Iron Man and War Machine have teamed up to defend the world. A competitor to Stark Industries infiltrates Tony Stark’s (aka Iron Man) research facility and makes off with a copy of his computer AI/butler Jarvis. What follows is a trip around the world, visiting such places as California, Russia, Hungary and Malaysia. Along the way you fight some classic villains like Crimson Dynamo and Firepower, but none of the boss fights are that interesting or challenging. Most of them just involve firing indiscriminately at an enemy until his health goes down or by successfully targeting his weak point. The back of the box enthusiastically points out that you will “fight skyscraper tall enemies”, neglecting to mention that it’s just one boss fight. The story isn’t really of any consequence. It attempts to go into the reasoning behind Tony Starks move to rid the world of his company’s weapons, but it doesn’t really do a good job of going into it.
Iron grip
Sega wisely chose to pass off development duties to High Voltage Software, developers behind The Conduit and many other Wii games. High Voltage has developed a bit of a reputation as a developer that can craft a Wii game with good controls. It is no surprise that Iron Man 2 scores well in this area. The game doesn’t offer the highly customizable controls that other High Voltage games do but the base controls do work rather well. The nunchuk is used to move around while the Wii remote is pointed at the screen to aim and fire. As a result, Iron Man 2 plays much like a third person shooter. Tapping the A button shoots repulser beams while the B trigger handles secondary weapons such as the Uni-Beam, a giant beam that comes from the arc reactor in the chest, or missiles. Dodging is handled by using the left and right directions on the dpad and pressing down switches between your secondary weapons.
Melee controls on the other hand are a bit of a letdown. They are done by shaking the nunchuk. More often than not you will completely miss whoever you were intending to hit. Even if you lock onto enemies with Z-targeting, you will usually end up punching the air beside them. Considering that it is almost always easier just to shoot them, most players will likely stick to those instead and use melee only as a last resort.
Your character can hover but you cannot control the height: the game will automatically adjust the player to the highest possible point. This is a bit of a shame but hardly a big loss as the flying missions are “on rails”. During these, you have to avoid enemy attacks for a while, after which they usually devolve into shooting a helicopter with as many missiles as you can, in as short a time span as possible. The same could be said about the on-foot missions, as shooting the same basic four or five enemies through 10+ levels gets old rather quickly.
5.5
fun score
Pros
Good use of the Wii controls
Cons
Bland graphics, boring gameplay.
