On removing Iron Man from its cellophane wrapper, any typical gamer is likely to have their fingers crossed, praying to the powers-that-be that it will serve as the veritable agent provocateur of superhero tie-ins, transforming the genre into something vibrant, fun and engaging.

It's not.

It's hard to find where criticism of Iron Man should begin. After effortlessly eroding the giddy heights of joy the movie managed to elicit, Iron Man: The Official Videogame of the Movie is somehow able to ruin itself by being needlessly complicated and simultaneously rudimentarily simplistic. On a difficulty mode higher than easy, you'll find yourself being shot out of the sky far more often than you'd prefer. Missiles are flung at you in such quantities that successfully dodging them all is, quite frankly, impossible. You're forced to sit and wait under cover for your energy bar to fill back up, and whilst this sensation creates an intense evocation of danger and dread in 4, does nothing more than cause an immense excruciating anger in Iron Man.

The game loosely follows the plot of the excellent movie. Robert Downey Jr and Terrence Howard provide voice acting for Tony Stark and Rhodey, respectively, although their performances sound like they unexcitedly phoned them in. I can hardly blame them. The plot of the movie is brusquely encapsulated in the first level, as billionaire weapons manufacturer Stark breaks free of his Afghan captors, and the rest of the game is spent with you flying Iron Man around levels blowing up the weapons he once developed but now seeks to eradicate, returning to the movie to provide the final level encounter with Iron Monger. The bulk of the game is made up of appearances from AIM and Maggia, which might pique the interest of fans of the Universe. Any excitement will be short-lived because the game falls down as soon as you start trying to play it.

Movement, possibly the most basic and fundamental part of an game, has the unfortunate downside in Iron Man of being on par with having both your knees shattered and then being forced to walk to the supermarket. Holding down the left trigger causes you to gain altitude, which is all well and good until you have to hold the trigger half-depressed to maintain said altitude. To rub salt into the wound, there's no proper way to decelerate or lose altitude other than letting go of the buttons and watching as Iron Man drops out of the sky and hits the ground with a thud. Moving forwards, too, can be problematic as the only two speeds - fast and super fast - work in tandem to cause a great deal of agony to any poor, determined player. The game may as well be a pinball simulator, as Iron Man collides, scrapes and bounces off walls, floors and mountains in the first game since the insipid Spinball where basic movement feels like it's entirely down to chance.

Flying Iron Man is not a precise art, then, and the fighting controls are sympathetic to this by making the automatic lock-on so precise that blowing up a screen of enemies is simply a case of holding down the right trigger and hoping you don't get beaten down with a barrage of forty missiles before everything dies. Defeating something feels unrewarding, as you watch their health bar tick down whilst your hand-mounted repulsor cannons do their magic. The repulsors, though, feel like they pack about as much oomph as an LED. Stark might as well be sporting two dodgy laser pointers he picked up from Poundland. The other weapons - namely a bigger, chest mounted laser, grappling abilities and a mean punch - are fiddly to utilise and subsequently left to stagnate by the wayside.

In a peculiar twist, the game is sometimes hampered by its own over-ambition; Secret Level have tried to keep everything chugging along with a desire for both fiddly and scattered aerial fighting juxtaposed with redundant and unnecessary ground combat - an attempt to blend both Ace Combat and into the same game. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't work. Realistically, it's hard to even conceive how this was judged to be a good idea. Bland, cookie-cutter movie tie-in games are notoriously rushed out of the studio, yet Secret Level somehow assumed they could make something obviously hard to implement from the offset magically possible with Iron Man. It doesn't work. A spectacular failure as soon as the first eye-curdling cinematic unfolds, Iron Man is a game that has no idea what it's doing.

The single biggest bone you can pick with Iron Man, though, is its remarkable and unflinching demand to adhere to archaic videogaming traditions. Secret Level has tried to shoehorn in as many as they possibly can. Iron Man features, but is not limited to: a giant structure that can only be blown up with a boss's own weapon; having to defend something for a certain amount of time; enemies with regenerating health to pad out the battle; upgrades to armour, repulsors etc. being unlocked with credits you accumulate after levels; bosses who are extra resilient to your weapons so you have to shoot them twice as much; things that can only be destroyed after you blow up other certain things. Having the Iron Man license gives the developers a whole universe of possibility to play around in and it is a vastly frustrating experience thinking about all the wasted potential that Secret Level have flittered away to create their wholly average experience.

It's entirely possible to polish off Iron Man in an evening, and as is de rigueur with superhero games, several unlockable costumes are available to pad out the experience. There's a small amount of joy that Iron Man fans can derive from seeing the Extremis and Silver Centurion armours, but you'll hardly be gawping at these underwhelming low-poly, crudely-lit models flying around lacklustre, featureless environments. You're better off just reading the comics.

It seems Secret Level somehow managed to circumvent everything that can make games fun as they produced Iron Man. It's not awful, but its decidedly below average from beginning to end. The game is not necessarily the laziest attempt at a cash-in I've ever played, but it's certainly on the right track.

30%

By Martin Gaston