Iron Man (Wii)

The summer season is nearly here, and this means that there’s soon going to be many blockbuster films grossing hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office worldwide. With these films normally comes some sort of franchise film-to-videogame adaptation, just to squeeze a few more pounds out of us. The first in the season this year is Iron Man.

As with most film-to-videogame adaptations, the title is available across all major platforms, and with Iron Man, this is no different. The title can be found on the Wii, DS, PS2, PS3, PSP and the Xbox 360. Secret Level developed both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 versions, whilst the Wii version was developed by A2M, the same people who made The Golden Compass game last year.

Iron Man on the Wii manages to make some use of the Wii Remote by making any real form of movement utilize the remote. Rather than actually turning left on the Nunchuck, the player must move the cursor on screen left via the Wii Remote. This style of control is hard to get used to, and there is a steep learning curve when learning how to control Tony, although after a short while it becomes fairly easy to use the Wii Remote to navigate through the levels.

One problem with the controls is combat whilst flying. Considering that Iron Man is mostly about flying and killing terrorists in the air, there’s little chance to actually battle with planes, helicopters and other creatures in the sky as flying at any speed means that the player will never actually hit their target. Essentially the game becomes less about flying, and more about hovering around trying to hit a target that’s several hundred metres away.

One aspect that adds insult to injury is the fact that it’s so easy to hover around and fly at slower speeds that it renders a lot of the enemies in the game useless, as it’s just easy to fly over all of the enemies. Speaking of enemies, it’s not only easy to avoid them, but it’s also hard to be damaged by them. It’s hard to be damaged by them as it takes a press of the d-Pad to divert additional energy to either Armour, Flying or Weaponry. This clever little feature unfortunately makes the game far too easy for general combat, but it comes in very handy when Tony has to fly across the entire level at great speed to destroy a missile.

Unfortunately, there is far too little of that, and the bulk of the game is comprised of making Tony fly around looking after various different trucks that need to be protected and by running around on the ground destroying crates of Stark Technology that have been seized by the terrorists.

The graphics on the Iron Man aren’t great, but they could be a lot worse. With some fairly good looking cut-scenes and a great menu navigation, the actual in-game graphics pale in comparison. They’re blocky and fairly bland in colour, although they are far superior to other previous franchise games on the same platform. Speaking of which, the voice acting in this game isn’t great, and the voices aren’t even the same as the actors in the films -- no surprise there.

Ultimately, this game lacks what made the film brilliant, and that’s fun, high-speed flying action. This is what would be expected of an Iron Man title. However, it’s not all bad: if the Iron Man title was dropped, the game wouldn’t be too poor at all. A little slow in places, and with some obvious linear level design, but nothing that could constitute an awful game.

Final Verdict - 6/10
Overall, the Iron Man title on the Wii lacked the spark that the film had; however, it’s a huge step up from last year's A2M film franchise adaptation, known as The Golden Compass. That said, if players are looking for a film to game adaptation that actually reflects the film, they should look elsewhere.