Something unusual and amazing has happened. Whether it’s that the planets have aligned or there’s been a solar flare, whatever the reason, there is finally a good Iron Man game. It’s called Iron Man 3 and it’s on the mobile platform no less. And made by Gameloft.
Iron Man 3 the game was released last week alongside the blockbuster movie and we here at AndroidStory have been hotly awaiting its release. Hell, we released a First Look article hours after it was released on Android. So you’d think with our expectations so high that we’d be disappointed. Wrong. Iron Man 3 is quite simply an awesome combination of the endless runner game type and our favourite superhero in his suit of armour. Whether this does well or not is irrelevant, this is what Iron Man gaming fans will have been waiting for, and now we’ll look at why.
When you first load up Iron Man 3, you are greeted with this in the Main Menu:
Just so you know, you can actually touch and rotate the suit to have a look at that hunk of technical genius from all angles. Yes, my Nexus 7 struggles to load this up smoothly, but this is nonetheless a very cool feature, and as you unlock more suits in the game, the last suit you use before quitting will be available for your perusal when you load up the game.
There is actually an attempted storyline in this game, and while I’m not sure it’s related to the movie at all, it’s not terribly good. The game will put you through missions which will have you getting as far through the levels as you can, much like Temple Run. Where it differs from Temple Run is that there are Daily Missions that allow you to defeat boss characters and unlock a bit more of the story. It is a pretty cool gimmick as we have seen how well episodic content has been doing lately, so we’ll see where Gameloft goes with this.
Each time you go out on a run, there are several achievements and milestones that are set for you to try and met; some are accumulative and some are to be met on a single run. Meeting these conditions will usually net you some kind of reward, coming in the form of Stark credits or ISO-8. Stark credits are the objects you will be running over them to collect in the game, but ISO-8 credits are much harder to come by. They can only be collected either by levelling up or defeating bosses (but as this is a Gameloft game, you can actually just buy both these commodities).
Stark credits can be used to upgrade your special, attack or health, but the key thing here is that each suit has its own special characteristics. Suits are unlocked by surrendering your collected XP points and then still require addition Stark credits to build the suits. If playing the game and unlocking those takes too long, you can always get 15,000 ISO-8 to pay to unlock them all. The unlock screen, or tech tree, is actually very impressively made with the three trees able to be manipulated individually and seeing which suits you’d like to unlock first. Most of the suits are new, and presumably in the new movie, but there are some old favourites though disappointingly no retro options.
Beyond unlocking all suits, ISO-8 can also be used to revive yourself after you fail at a run or buying bonuses at the start of levels, though, I would stress careful use of ISO-8 as it is a very scarce commodity. Unless you pay for it of course.
As for the actual levels, there are a pleasant number of different obstacles to avoid ranging from stationary boxes right up to missiles screaming past our tiny armour protagonist. There are also enemies that Iron Man will encounter which can be defeated by swiping or tapping the enemy till its health bar is depleted.
There is also a social component to Iron Man 3 as you can share your high scores on Facebook or Twitter, though I haven’t explored this aspect too much as I fear that people may find out that I am Iron Man…
While I do like this game a lot, there are some things that peeve me a great deal. I imagine Robert Downey Jr. had much better things to do than lend their voices to a video game, the game makes no attempt to even replicate the snide cynicism and amazing one-liners that fans have come to love in Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Iron Man. He and the Pepper Potts voice actors sound nothing like their film counterparts, and while that in itself might not be an issue, they don’t act in a way that we’d expect or that resembles any sort of intimacy between the two, and that fact is very jarring to witness.
The one other things that irks me is the fact that the game struggles to run on my Nexus 7 tablet at times. Now I understand that the Nexus 7 isn’t the newest slate on the market, but it’s not exactly a slob either, so the fact that the main menu extravaganza and high-explosion sequences in-game do judder along sometimes is slightly annoying.
Not everyone is going to love this game; some people will find more comfort in sticking with Temple Run. But I don’t feel that’s the point of the game. It’s a fan’s game and it ticks all the boxes: it has all the suits, you can examine all the suits, and it has Iron Man doing what Iron Man does best, flying through obstacles blowing everything up.
This game makes a whole lot of sense: the endless running, the suits, the flying, the lasers, and did I mention the suits? Every fan who picks it up will love it, and I hope even those who aren’t fans pick it up and give it a go.
Game: Iron Man 3
Price: Free
