Iron Man 2 Review

Coming out around the time of the upcoming movie, Sega is releasing an Iron Man 2 video game. The game has been in development for two years, according to the developers, which is a decent amount of time for a movie license. The developers told me that they didn’t feel that they had enough time to work on the first Iron Man game. Iron Man 2 should make up for that.

Mike McHale, Development Director of Iron Man 2 for Sega, says that they wanted to make sure that the team tried not to be limited by the movie’s story. According to him, they found through focus testing that players would rather play new missions than essentially retracing the same elements of the movie in digital form.

Unlike a lot of other super hero games (such as Spider-Man), Iron Man 2 will not be an open-world game. “The challenge with an open-world game is that you need a lot of content,” McHale said. Instead, you will switch between interior and exterior environments. The levels inside of buildings will involve more hand-to-hand combat, while outside missions will have a lot more flying.

A complaint leveled against the original Iron Man game was the controls. The transition from hovering to flying is “really smooth… it’s all about simple and ease of use for the gamer,” McHale told me. Clearly it is important to be able to have this fixed and Sega is promising that it is. We’ll see when I get my hands on the final product in less than a month.