Iron Man

How can my expectations get any lower? I know that "The Official Game Of The Blockbuster Box Office Smash" is synonymous with "Big Pile Of Crap", and yet I go into these things thinking "maybe it won't be woefully incompetent..." And to be fair, Iron Man is not terrible: just pointless.

The first level should set your standards nice and low, setting the scene for a game filled with good-ideas-shame-about-the-fact-it-was-clearly-rushed-to-market. It's a basically good idea for a training level (Tony "Iron Man" Stark attempts to escape from his middle-eastern captors with his weapons systems coming online one by one, giving the player a chance to get used to each new ability), but once you've set your fiftieth identical solider alight, you'll be wondering if it would have killed the developers to come up with a couple of different animations.

That said, the flying levels (which make up the meat of the game) are enormous fun. It takes a little while to get used to the controls, but once you've got your jets under control you'll find the aerial combat exhilarating - but it doesn't make up for the repetitive fight-your-way-to-the-end-of-the-level-for-the-inevitable-boss-battle plotting and boxy animations in the cutscenes - and the game goes from "humdrum" to "insanely difficult" at the halfway mark without any warning. While the flight levels are fun, the tedious gameplay outweighs even that small joy.

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