IRON MAN VR
All together now… Tony Stark, doo doo doo doo doo-doo!
This isn’t the first in a series of PS VR interpretations of Black Sabbath songs. What it is, is something even better: an opportunity to pretend that you’re super-rich and incredibly clever! Oh, and also there’s a flying suit of armour involved. Given all those elements, it would have been easy for Camouflaj to have thrown together a halfbaked piece of fan bait, but happily that’s not what happened here.
This is so much more than a virtual-reality shooting range. Iron Man VR offers a full-fat Tony Stark experience, letting you walk (well, teleport) in Tony’s Guccis in between flying around in a militarised onesie. Although telling an original story, the script and character designs take their cues more from the MCU than the cartoons and comics, and they work very well. The actors, too, all do a wonderful job, to the point where picking out just one or two feels unfair. We must applaud Josh Keaton’s Tony Stark for successfully stepping out from Robert Downey Jr’s shadow, though.
This can only be played with two PlayStation Move controllers, and it’s soon apparent why. As Tony, you find lots of wonderful little touches in the small piece of his mansion you get to explore. There are weights to lift, podcasts to find on a tablet, a basketball hoop game to challenge yourself with… Iron Man VR is full of these brilliant details. (Keep an eye out for the tips on the loading screen of mission 11). There are even literal trophy shelves that fill up as you earn the game’s trophies. Yet with our psychic powers, we hear you scream: “But what’s it like to fly the iron suit?”
YOU REPULSOR ME
The answer is: fantastic. Your flight speed and direction is determined entirely by how you manipulate the repulsors in the palms of your hands, something that is easy to learn and very, very easy to enjoy. How you position each hand also determines the glove’s function – palm down to fly, palm out to shoot, fist forward to fire your secondary weapon. You can even use one hand to attack and one hand to fly, combining manoeuvrability and offence at the cost of reduced speed and agility.
It’s worth noting that if you can’t stand, or you struggle to stand for extended periods, you should definitely try the demo before making a purchase. We found it very difficult to retain the freedom of movement required for our arms and wrists while in a sitting position, soon settling into a rhythm of sitting as Tony, and standing for the Iron Man action sequences.
The story is about seven hours long, which is pretty chonky for a VR adventure. The truth is that the game would
“WITH THE SHEER JOY OF PILOTING TONY’S ARMOUR, THINGS NEVER GET DULL.”
have been even better with one of those hours shaved off, which would have mitigated the limited number of enemy types, and perhaps reduced the recycling of a few locations. There’s also shameless padding in the form of a few of the flight and combat challenges being made compulsory in order to advance the story.
The game never stops being superb Marvel geek wishfulfilment, but it does threaten to sag now and again.
TONY, TO YOU
Aside from a few boss fights (which are great), you spend your time shooting a handful of different drone types, as your foe is a mysterious hacker named Ghost. The drones all pose different threats, and generally demand different tactics; combined with the sheer joy of piloting Tony’s armour, things never get dull. Using your boost to narrowly avoid a huge laser beam of death, shooting down rapidly approaching enemies, then rushing to the ground to repeatedly punch a tank into submission delivers a thrill you can’t get anywhere else.
What comes through in every chapter is the fact that this has been built by people who know and love Iron Man. Tony throws out characteristic witticisms at every opportunity, and Pepper Potts and FRIDAY bat them right back at him. The penultimate chapter even forces Tony to confront his dark past with surprising impact, which doubles as a commentary on the blood-soaked business side of war. We enjoyed it so much, we can’t talk it Downey.