Disaster Report: Iron Man (PS2)
It’s easy to forget that before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became the biggest thing ever in films, Iron Man was a second string, b-tier Marvel hero. Sure, people were aware of him, he tended to stick his noseless faceplate into anything Avengers related, he had a cartoon that came and went in the mid-90s, and you could always expect him to tag along during any big crossover. But if you weren’t a comic book fan, you probably didn’t even know the name Tony Stark, and when it came to what he actually did in comics, you might, at best, have a vague awareness that he had an alcohol problem.
Marvel’s Bruce Wayne wasn’t a bad hero, but he wasn’t exactly finding an audience the same way Spider-Man and the X-Men were. He was even less popular than the Fantastic Four, which nowadays sounds inconceivable if only because that unfortunate family team has fallen in favor since the new millennium began. Iron Man’s second rate status meant that Marvel hadn’t sold the movie rights off into the iron grip of someone like Fox or Sony though, and in a now legendary gamble, they bet the house on their ability to make a few movies on their characters with the condition that, if they don’t pull themselves out of the financial hole they were in around 2008, the licenses to these Marvel characters would be completely handed over to another party.
And then, they made a blockbuster sensation that turned Hollywood on its head.
Technically, they did still end up with their intellectual property integrated into the Disney leviathan, but Marvel is still Marvel with its stable of heroes intact. In fact, the success of Iron Man and what followed with the interconnected Marvel Cinematic Universe was what made them such a juicy property that the Mouse couldn’t resist hooking up their milking machine to this cash cow. Iron Man paved the way for a superhero movie renaissance, and all of it was off the shoulders of the sarcastic take on Tony Stark brought to life by Robert Downey Jr.. It was a watershed moment for cinema in the 2000s that built up to the highest grossing film of all time with Avengers Endgame, but while the Iron Man film managed to show the direction movies would be heading for the next decade, the games based on it were sort of a sign of the path licensed games were going down.
Iron Man’s tie-in video game was released on too many systems. DS, Wii, PSP, PS2, PS3, PC, Xbox 360… I’m honestly a little surprised they didn’t double back onto the original Xbox just because. The console generation was changing over so it was hard to determine if you wanted your game on a system with a huge install base or if you wanted to get in on the ground floor on the new systems, so it’s not too surprising Iron Man went this route, but it also meant there were differences across the versions that lead to differences between the experiences. The Wii got motion controls of course, the DS couldn’t do the open 3D environments so it tightened things up onto the touch screen, and the PlayStation 2 version we are looking today has worse graphics than the PS3 and Xbox 360 version, no special gimmicks, but more content than some other versions of the game.
That is not a good thing.
Iron Man for PlayStation 2 shows us why the licensed games were a dying breed around this time, as the low effort cash grabs accompanying every movie release were going to get more expensive to produce in the following generation. It’s a shame we never got a proper game based on generation defining movies like The Avengers, but its quite likely that if we had, it would be about on par with this pathetic attempt to capture the thrills of being Marvel’s new biggest hero.
THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN
When you start up Iron Man for the first time, you’re thrown in with no real set-up for the coming action. The game must assume you’ve seen the film, which since it released around the same time, it was a fair bet that you’d only buy the game after the movie actually made the character actually interesting to you. However, this means that as soon as you start playing, Sega saw it fit not to explain why Tony Stark finds himself in a cave in the middle desert, who this old man he’s talking to like a friend is, why Tony has a new doodad on his chest, or what inspired him to make the initial Iron Man suit. You could read the manual for a brief sum-up of how things start, but why it doesn’t at least do a brief introduction in game is perplexing. We pop right in and see Tony’s got the original chunky grey Iron Man suit ready and is about to go on a rampage to break himself free, which is also the tutorial level that does a pretty job acclimating you to the game since this first level has Iron Man both invincible and overpowered in every way save for his lack of flight.
Iron Man busts out of his prison cell and immediately the terrorists holding him captive open fire, but despite filling this level with these guys, their guns do nothing to you. Even the rockets fired at you later on just make you stop attacking for a bit as you flinch from them, but there is no danger to be found in this first stage. You just slowly tromp forward, receive tutorial messages, and use your flamethrower to instantly kill any man in your way. The flamethrower kills the terrorists the moment it touches them so most fights are walking up to the guy, farting out a tiny flame, and then moving over to the next guy more like you’re tidying up the throw pillows on your living room furniture than killing the kidnappers who nearly killed you and proceed to kill the old man. This old man is Yinsen, the guy who helps Tony Stark undergo his character change from a war profiteer to a defender of peace while they’re both held captive to create weapons for the terrorist organization, but we only ever really learn that in game when later flashback scenes sometimes broach the topic.
This opening segment does have Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” playing over it to try and be awesome, and looking at the construction of the event, this could be a really good power trip… if placed at the end of the adventure. After a long game full of challenging battles, a game might sometimes whip out a level where you’re untouchable and overpowered to reward you with some mindless cathartic carnage, although the fact my mind brings up games like Blades of Time and Knack instead of ones people have played as examples of this might not illustrate my point very well. Still, because of the construction of the film, Iron Man’s game adaptation needs to put this segment as the lumbering silver suit at the start, and thus you kick things off by being so hypercapable that the opening level really feels like it wastes the one time it whips out Black Sabbath’s coincidentally named hit.
After this level you’d think the next few stages would start to get you used to the idea you can die, but in his new Iron Man suits, Tony Stark still struggles to find himself in mortal peril. Gunmen are still scattered around every level to the point I have to assume they are dealing some damage even though they never seem to have an impact on the meter that shows armor strength. Rather than a health bar, Iron Man’s suit has *consults manual* Power Distribution/Health. The Iron Man armor has three systems you can divert power to, these being Propulsion to make you fly ridiculous fast the few times you might want to do that (read: when you’re in a big empty stretch of nothing that you want to fly past), Weapons when you want to use the Unibeam for slower damage than the regular weapons while leaving yourself more vulnerable, and then Armor. Already it seems like Iron Man’s armor is inconsistent in how much damage it takes. Sometimes it survives multiple shots from a tank’s cannon like it’s nothing, but then in another level the guns on a helicopter suddenly do enough damage to have warning messages popping up on your screen. Still, it’s fairly easy to avoid death with some pretty lazy dodging, as in, fly left and right a bit, but you can divert power from other systems at any time to shore up your armor. Which basically makes you invincible despite limiting what weapons you can use.
While in powered up armor mode though, your fists are stronger, and this means in tight interior levels you might as well go wild with your fists for free. Sometimes though your fists won’t register as actually hitting their targets so it’s not totally reliable by way of glitchy detection. Still, between already shrugging off most damage and having the ability to put your defenses into overdrive, I was actually growing to wonder if I could die. So, I had Iron Man walk out over some land mines that instantly… knocked him down and started up a revival minigame. If your Power Distribution to your Health systems or however the game wants to call it is worn down, you still have a chance to stay in the action by pressing a few buttons to get your heart going again. Considering you can have at least four revivals for free this way, you’re almost guaranteed to beat a level unless you trigger some other failure state. The only time I completely failed a level was because there was a boss who seemed to be draining power from radiation containers so I though blowing them up would prevent him from topping off his energy. However, since Iron Man was currently speaking with the boss, the messages from Tony’s support team weren’t coming through to warn me that I shouldn’t be doing that, and by the time it was too late, I was being told that breaking the containers would release deadly amounts of radiation that would lead to an immediate failure.
To Iron Man’s credit, some of the later levels do begin to actually push against you with enough difficulty to require that revival game, usually if there’s some instant kill weapon like a laser cannon that thankfully leaves you intact enough to restart your heart. The difficulty is never really where it should be though, considering the final battle with Iron Monger is a lot of running around and doing basic attacks until he’s in a good spot to be shocked or punched. The final battle was actually so underwhelming that I was prepared for a new twist to happen after I defeated him to make him a real threat, but most of the bosses fought before Iron Monger were more difficult, and even then that’s not technically saying much either.
LESS THAN MARVELOUS
Putting aside some of the game systems for now, let’s start to take a look at the general construction of Iron Man’s movie tie-in game. Surprisingly, Robert Downey Jr. actually lends his voice to the game, which is a surprise because the performance makes it sound like he’s doing a sleepy impression of Brian Posehn most of the game. Missing is the wit and charm from the film as Tony Stark delivers most every line with the same cadence, something I like to call irritated mumbling. Pepper Potts, not reprised by Gwyneth Paltrow, is given an unflattering face that looks like it’s carved from glass, and the cutscenes in general have plenty of problems besides bad performances and character models. Not only will the game sometimes skip one if it feels like it, but they start to slow to a crawl at times, the frame rate becoming abysmal and looking like you’re playing an online game with heavy lag. The few times Robert can put some heart into his performance are undermined when it looks like Tony is having to push through water to move through the cutscenes, but considering most are there just to tell you how the plot is about to divert away from the film’s, it’s not like you’re missing all that much.
As is the norm for a comic book movie being made into a video game, the adventure takes some deviations from the main story to face off with some of the villains fans would be familiar with from the comics. What this manifests as mostly is Iron Man spending 80% of the game trying to either prevent the Maggia family and Advanced Idea Mechanics from taking his weapons or Tony going to destroy the weapons they already have from when he sold them willingly. Obadiah Stane, the eventual Iron Monger, gets some cutscenes to remind you he exists where he tells the bad guys he totally approves of them being bad guys before the game culminates in its underwhelming conclusion with his battle.
The path there does involve Iron Man facing off with some foes comic book fans will pretend they love if you ask them about them. We have Blacklash appear as the first real boss, who seems to be the old version of the villain Whiplash who looks very much unlike Mickey Rourke would in Iron Man 2, and despite him having energy shields that pop up to prevent you from hurting him while he does easily dodged whip attacks, you can just run up and punch him right through them despite the fact this won’t work with later bosses who utilize the same forcefields. We have Melter, who the game introduced by Tony blurting out “Horgan” seemingly randomly as he realizes who must be in charge of this part of AIM and is probably the de facto hardest boss since he can hit you hard and then you need to stand behind the big central gizmo in the fight to let your armor automatically recover. The Controller appears, but even though Wikipedia assures me he is defeated after your encounter with him, he stands in an office and messes with you a few times without ever being directly fought. He rants about his incredible power as he briefly disorients you, the player needing to align two images or else their controls will briefly be reversed. Which is certainly as devastating as the developers intended since then my effective dodging method of lazily drifting left and right was shifted to instead be lazily drifting from right to left! He just disappears from the story after you beat his level without you even destroying the ship he was on, and I kept waiting for him to reappear until it was clear the game just forgot he was unresolved.
Titanium Man is the most memorable fight, because for some reason, even though the premise of the first fight is getting him so overloaded with radiation he explodes… you rematch him! His fight is the epitome of lazy drift dodging, as you dodge his attacks easily, fire on him when his forcefield goes down, rinse, and repeat. When he touches those radiation containers I mentioned earlier you can move in and punch him for more damage, but that’s basically all there is to both fights. There’s a giant tank boss near the start that you just fire safely on from range, and I really don’t think its worth spending more energy talking about the Iron Monger fight when they’re so ridiculously straight forward. Don’t get hit, fire on him, and when the electricity field is up in the second phase, he’ll walk into it pretty willingly if you stand on the other side of it.
Regular combat certainly isn’t going to save the game either. Your repulsor beams one-shot regular troops, take maybe four for the normal vehicles, and then tanks require a bit more than that. Weapon overuse will mean you have to wait a bit to keep firing the repulsor beams, but you have machine guns and rockets to fire as well, and rockets will destroy vehicles or tough foes much more quickly. Vehicles also tend to have a button prompt appear when they’re almost destroyed, so if you want to move in close and do a scripted action sequence by hammering the same button again and then a random one to wrap it up, you can. This is mostly not worth the trouble since you’re probably fighting the tank or copter from about as far away as possible before their model disappears due to draw distance issues, but it can give you time to recover your beams if you’d rather not wait a few seconds.
The main incentive for switching up your weapons isn’t really the repulsor cool down, but an upgrade system that the game really makes it sound like you’re meant to apply manually but it just automatically does so based on your performance in missions. Each mission gives each system of your suit a rating out of 100 you can get for using your weapon systems that contribute to upgrades that get automatically applied. Adding EMP blasts to missiles, electrifying your fists for free, lowering power usage, and other little additions are achieved by just using the associated things enough in a regular mission. Since Tony Stark isn’t running around Afghanistan naked, every level will inevitably give you 100 out of 100 experience for your armor, but switching to your machine guns and rockets sometimes will mean you can level those up too.
Being able to do missions faster is a blessing since they get rather tedious rather quickly. If the general lack of mortal peril wasn’t clue enough, most of the missions boil down to flying up to something as Iron Man, blasting stuff apart with ease, and then moving onto the next thing that needs blowing up. Some levels try to add more stakes to it, like the flying fortress where one part of the mission involves routinely going under the vessel, zapping a mine it tries to drop, and then going back to the actual missions. This is imitated in the level where you need to destroy bunkers around a mansion to find some evil lady you only ever see the arm of, where sometimes she starts to arm missiles but you have plenty of time to fly over and zap them instantly out of existence and get back to what you were doing.
As you can see the mission design is mostly half-baked and unable to concoct a true challenge for Iron Man, perhaps the most difficult objective being the level where you need to fly above a weapon transport truck until it reaches its destination. You don’t need to hide or anything, you can even hover right on top of it and they’ll drive on obliviously, but as other things begin to attack you, it might start moving along and the game wants you rather close to it since it will disappear due to draw distance issues rather easily. So, don’t get distracted blasting apart the easily killed enemies as you follow it and you’ll be fine, and that is basically the only mission that puts up a good fight save for ones that pack instant kill lasers that you technically need to be watchful of.
BUILT IN MONTREAL WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS
While I don’t want to be too hard on developers Artificial Mind & Movement, esteemed developers of Smurf Racer, Drake Josh: Talent Showdown, and the Game Boy Advance adaptation of Disney’s monumentally bland Home on the Range film about cows so uninteresting they barely fill 76 minutes of run time, this has all the hallmarks of a game rushed through production without the proper level of testing. This is all too common for movie tie-in games, and Sega around this era was notorious in general for rushing out games despite it again and again leading to infamous failures like 2006’s Sonic the Hedgehog and later 2013’s Alien: Colonial Marines. The people in the included “making of” feature seem happy and they very well might have been, but even if they put their heart into an Iron Man game… they were making it for 7 different systems, some which required substantial reworks to even function properly on them.
It’s definitely no surprise we have the glitches and troubles that crop up in the PlayStation 2 version then. Already mentioned was the problem with cutscenes starting to slow down to a crawl or not play at all, but the game crashing entirely isn’t all that rare either. It even crashed once while trying to save my game, and I was about to really let Iron Man have it for destroying a memory card filled with valuable game files, but luckily the game freezing just lead to me not having the fact I finished the mission be saved. And while replaying a level wasn’t enjoyable, it was still easily done compared to replaying every game in that memory card that could have been wiped. Loading is where it most often gave up the ghost, and it’s likely the cutscenes it forgot to play were caused by loading issues as well. However, it’s a bit more difficult to figure out why Tony Stark suddenly started repeating the same line over and over at one point, repeating “Rhodey they’ve done it” like an echo until his next new line of dialogue in the scene started.
More impactful were the glitches that outright impacted gameplay. I won’t fault Iron Man for its buggy camera angles, I’ve ignored similar unwieldy cameras in high quality titles since it only really makes an impact if it interferes with play. Having your camera in a wall or end up looking at the interior of a box could be deadly in another game, but here it just means Iron Man needs to take a time out as he gets it under control, most interior areas where the camera could misbehave not really packing any dangers worth worrying about save traps that you shouldn’t be walking into while fixing your view.
However, I will fault Iron Man for the odd ways its enemies behave. Sometimes I found enemy troops standing in place, unable to be reached, unable to be hurt, just looking at me in their unmoving, unfeeling limbo. I could not kill them to free them, so I was forced to leave them behind to their endless torment. A bit more unusual than characters who probably didn’t load in properly though are the way vehicles interact with each other. That weapon delivery truck mentioned earlier absolutely refused to let anything get in its way, so while I was fighting a tank that had positioned itself in front of the moving truck, the truck pushed the tank down through the ground and tumbling off into the endless void beneath the level. In perhaps an even stranger instance, I was fighting some cars with weapons mounted on top of them, and after blowing one up and the tank next to it, I was baffled as to the source of the incoming heavy fire Iron Man was taking. There were no other visible enemies nearby… until it became clear that another car of the same exact type had been inside the first car, meaning it was now sitting in the wreckage of the one that exploded without that blast taking out its matryoshka second car.
Perhaps the best part of the two truck related glitches shown in this subsection is that it wasn’t even hard to make gifs of them since the truck glitches happened so reliably.
While it’s certainly likely the fact Iron Man takes no damage from some tanks but gets floored by others is an error of some kind, the damage and hit detection in the game is so inconsistent I don’t feel qualified to try and evaluate it. Sometimes you’re in danger and sometimes you aren’t, and coming to accept it isn’t really necessary either since only a few rare things in this game must truly be worried about.
I’m sure there could be other glitches in Iron Man waiting to be uncovered. The high speed flight in unwieldy since pressing any direction when it starts sends Iron Man zooming off wildly in that direction, and it’s not hard to imagine that could get you into some clipping trouble easily. Flying with any sort of speed is mostly just done to get around in long empty stretches or to help you through rings in the tutorial stages though, so there was very little reason to whip it out when hovering around was safer and easier to control. Still, if you want to ram the bucket head’s skull into the ground in search of the seams, maybe you’ll find some more amusing glitches to document to fill your time instead of dealing with the same easily dispatched batches of baddies again and again.
THE CONCLUSION
Iron Man for PlayStation 2 is the kind of game where you turn off your brain while you play it, not because it provides dumb fun, but because you won’t really need it. Iron Man hardly needs to worry about death, and even when he is in danger, lightly hovering to the sides is often enough to throw off the aim of the few foes you need to worry about. Missions are basic and don’t ask for much more than killing sprees with your overpowered weapons, bosses are barely a blip with their unexceptional battle methods, and glitches routinely add unusual hiccups to the play while bad programming leads to game crashes and unusual framerates during cutscenes. Iron Man is poorly built and poorly planned out, unable to excite as its hero is far too powerful to be bothered by anything in his path.
It’s hard to imagine any of the other versions of this game turned out better, although the more limited scope of the DS game may make it merely forgettable rather than poorly designed all around. This wasn’t Iron Man’s first leading role in a video game, he starred alongside whoever the hell X-O Manowar is in Iron Man/ X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal that was released across multiple consoles and got terrible reviews, and then there’s The Invincible Iron Man for GBA which I literally never heard of before today… but later he’d get more games based on him! He got Iron Man VR which has had a tepid reception… and the Iron Man 2 film adaptations also got poor reviews…
Well, the point I was trying to approach before I got sidetracked by his awful track record is that Iron Man isn’t a poor fit for video games although it seems he fails every time he is in the starring role. But with all the usual trappings of a rush licensed game, Iron Man did show the writing on the wall for the future of film tie-ins. It is poorly made, glitchy, meandering, and squanders what talent is involved as even Robert Downey Jr. didn’t seem to be willing or able to put his all into the creation of this title. The seventh generation of video game consoles lead to tie-in games drying up, which meant that more games were making it to market because people actually had ideas for games rather than just trying to slap something together to capitalize on a currently hot brand. However, it also lead to a uniquely strange world of video games disappearing. A game like Iron Man may make some celebrate the disappearance of such titles, but even if The Avengers or Infinity War got crappy tie-ins, at least it would add some new part of history to those cultural touchstones. This is certainly less me being wistful for games like Iron Man and more wishing that games like it hadn’t killed the concept entirely, and I’m sure some executive is looking back at games like this and considering them a black mark on the franchise’s legacy.
Iron Man isn’t as obnoxious as some atrocious games though, and a path to fixing it is easier seen then some since it feels like this was more a game where everything that could be made in time was thrown in with little regard to whether it’s done or fun. Some time and focus to actually polish and test game mechanics could have lead to this game simply being mediocre!
Movies would be undergoing radical changes after Iron Man as cinematic universes came into vogue, but while Iron Man lead that charge, the game based on it wallowed in the old ways of licensed trash, meaning it went extinct while Marvel movies went on to define a generation.
Looking down at my copy of Iron Man, with its four price tags as it continued to plummet in price, its broken plastic inside meant to hold the disc, and the inexplicable presence of the manual despite being pre-owned and probably languishing on a Gamestop shelf without any protection for who knows how long, this dinged up copy is a good fit for the game inside. It doesn’t look terrible at a glance, but the more and more you look at it, the more little problems you notice, and in the PS2 game Iron Man, you’ll soon find that action that looks fine enough in random gameplay clips holds up rather poorly. Rather than being a game built as strong as iron, this paper thin experience falls apart when you realize it lacks the punch of playing as a superhero and the personality of playing as Tony Stark.
