We're talking about Marvel's Iron Man, so there's no point in turning around: you know how this review begins… with three words.
I ... am ... Iron Man
Yes, it is right to take flight in the coolest way, exactly as Tony Stark would do: with the right amount of arrogance and without worrying too much about landing.
Let's start immediately by saying that Marvel's Iron Man is incredibly consistent with Tony's character and it is in the thin semi-invisible line between the man and the suit that the title of Camouflaj tries to place itself, slipping slightly in the attempt and setting fire to half the garage ... but it is a great flight, an excellent circuit test for an experiment which, in a forthcoming iteration, has all the potential to go far beyond the limits it inevitably presents in this first act.
Marvel's Iron Man starts from an assumption that is also a constraint: to best return the feel of being a superhero, something that in part Batman Arkham VR had achieved, albeit with the due limits of what, to date, remains an excellent tech demo. Batman and Iron Man have a lot in common, but also a lot that divides them: if the former is gloomy and immersed in the molasses of a traumatic past like few others and a propensity for investigation and moving in the shadows, Iron Man is subtle and discreet as an explosive train ... in an explosives shop built inside a shopping center that sells only dynamite.
Since we have put on our PSVR it will not be long before we are in the armor, ready to fly and shoot, in a story that begins with a double awareness, both from Tony, ready to leave behind the past as a salesman of weapons of death, which by the game itself, which seems to want to determine immediately that now ... yes, Tony IS Iron Man and that, perhaps, redemption can really be earned by saving at least how many lives have been broken .
We create our own demons
You want a little for prejudice, a little for experience, but from a VR title dedicated to Iron Man few expect a compelling story: the aim is to have fun, cocktails to be obtained with the right combination of the verbs "fly" and "shoot" . Despite this, we would like to clarify that the story is governed by a few moments, small bubbles of intimacy between characters which, excellent contrast to the "bombastic" moments that permeate the title, remain suspended in the air and in the memory like fragile soap bubbles, capable to vanish, leaving behind small but permanent scars, on which the game itself overrides, much faster than we would like to do.
Don't get us wrong, flying and shooting have a really crazy feel in Marvel's Iron Man but, just like Tony's early armor Marks, there are limitations: a detail to mention is absolutely the rotation of the view, here not free due to obvious hardware limitations (AKA, the PSVR does not have 360 ° tracking) but which is made almost accessory thanks to a trick already seen previously in the God of War of Santa Monica Studios: the enemies, in fact, will tend to never attack us from behind. This greatly facilitates us in the most hectic sessions (and, we assure you, there will be) and completely lowers the difficulty of a game that is already quite easy in itself ... apparently.
Yes, it is a somewhat fictitious facility because each of our performance is evaluated at the end of the level, a calculation of which we do not know the criteria or relative room for maneuver and which will return us a variable number of points, from 1 to 5, which can be invested improve the armor itself and its various components. The annoyance is not in the assignment of points per se, relatively acceptable in a title that shouldn't pretend to be more than "fun", but in the fact that this evaluation is not in the least mentioned in-game during the execution of the level but only in a retrospective screen once the mission is finished.
Pace means having a bigger club than the others
We want to dedicate a few words to the armor improvements we mentioned earlier, an element that manages to outlive more than much else in the gameplay and flow contexts of a Marvel's Iron Man that expresses potential from every pore: well, the "upgrades" are one of the most interchangeable and secondary things of the title.
Let's talk about it only from the point of view of game design: during the level the player's only concern is and must be to stay alive; the level ends and the player is faced with a scoring evaluation of his performance, a potential spark that ignites his competitive spirit and pushes him to redo the level to improve the above score.
The reward? Extraordinary: the unlocking of a shot of the secondary weapon wider range. Her in-game convenience? Basically tending to zero.
While trying different configurations of the armor, we never noticed a technical feature or the various components that remained impressed on us, so much so that after about ten hours we don't even remember the name of most of them. The speech does not change very much when we move to the side of the purely aesthetic changes that Marvel's Iron Man allows us: there are just under a dozen possible colors for our armor but, even in this case, they are details one centimeter wide and deep a millimeter, short detours that risk going off the track, very quickly, very violently.
In fact, we have no way to see our suit in its entirety and, in the midst of the frenzy of the levels that we will face, we will not have the material time to ... stand and look at our arms.
Sometimes you have to run before you can walk
We have already said it and we repeat it: Marvel's Iron Man has fun when it does not take itself too seriously, the problem is that it often "hides" behind technicalities that do not suit the title too much. Even the "very simple" act of flying is immediate to understand, but even after the 12 levels that make up the title, you will feel as if you have not really fully learned the mechanism or the end freedom it allows.
The layout of the keys is initially chaotic and almost counter-intuitive, with the flight button placed on the PS Move backbone and the shot button on the front, leaving the task of distinguishing our repulsor shot from a secondary shot to the recognition of the position of our hands in space.
Two hands are not enough to share with you the number of times we have found ourselves catapulted back in an attempt to shoot or completely bewildered by the inelegant button mashing that that particular session brought us out. It is a chaos that we understand and which we hope is one of the focal points of the review of an eventual Marvel's Iron Man VR 2.
Before concluding this review of ours, we would like to make you understand how Marvel's Iron Man VR is a profoundly dual game, which alternates moments of frenetic and heart-pounding gameplay, with brackets outside the armor in which rhythm and narrative sink. (in almost all cases), a title that puts an interestingly detailed armor on the same field of vision, capable of transmitting immersion in a completely natural way, and an environment, citizen or natural, with lean assets to the bone , textures to be forgotten and spaces so abandoned to themselves as to make everything look like a rendering bug; a VR adventure that makes an enemy with a precise and palpable psychological depth share the stage with a generic madman with a crazy name. It is a dynamic balance that we understand and, in part, respect, but not without some reservations, especially for a title that so naturally captures the feel of flight and much more, like few others. Marvel's Iron Man VR is an excellent first excursion into the world of superhero virtual reality, by Marvel, and we can only confess anxious and curious about what will be the next step or, even, what will be Marvel's Iron Man VR 2.
