Iron Man

Early images of the Iron Man mobile game here at Pocket Gamer quietly ignited the retro geek in me, as the colourful 2D graphics harkened back to the classical shmup.

The bird's-eye-view of Tony Stark in full combat suit makes a terrific visual gesture toward memorable arcade shooters like 1942, and even Space Invaders itself. But rather than being a celebration of this heritage, the Iron Man mobile game uses it as an excuse for unequivocally slack gameplay.

Considering the emphasis the Iron Man movie places on ol' Shell Head's manoeuvrability, the game demonstrates its inherent failings almost immediately. Featuring the most basic and unresponsive of controls (left and right alone), there's almost no sensation of actually taking flight in Marvel's most famous suit of armour.

Confining you as it does to a single axis, Iron Man more closely resembles Space Invaders than 1942 – only without the interest of using a fire button. Shooting at the enemies is entirely automatic, and other than the limited application of a Repulsor Ray special weapon, the game boils down to avoiding return fire and trying to stay awake.

For an official film adaptation, there's surprisingly little going on to remind us of the dynamic life of Iron Man. As colourful and sweeping as the backdrops are, they also appear quite random and fail to stitch the repetitive events of the game together with any kind of entertaining coherence.

The decades of wonderful, futuristic lore behind the comic book character of Iron Man makes this lack of purpose sting a little more than many other drab titles in a similar position might do. Such profound confusion of plot and action, in the case of Iron Man, provides the developer with little excuse for failing to bring a bit of player empathy to the proceedings.

Fortunately the tedium of mechanical warmongering is soon over, and finishes unceremoniously after just four short levels. While these brief jaunts through drab skies are interspersed with cut-scenes in an attempt to crowbar what little story there is into the lacklustre gameplay, there's no impetus to push on to the ending.

Indeed, upon completion there was a few moments of doubt as to whether the game had stopped or crashed, such was the uninteresting reward for trudging through this extraordinarily tedious fare.

In truth, the Iron Man mobile game doesn't suggest so much of a badly constructed development as one made under extreme, irresponsible constraints. If we were told that the programmer was given but one week to create a movie tie-in game, this would have been a credible achievement.