For the interactive parts of the game, you control Tony Stark and the Iron Man armor from a third-person view in a series of open, outdoor levels. Iron Man travels about these settings by running, hovering and flying. His suit gives him rapid-fire repulsors, a hard-hitting omnibeam, missiles fired from his arms and super strength to smashing things with melee attacks. And that's just his offensive options. The only limits on these abilities are his health and his power. You may have to wait for the power to come back up, but Iron Man is never out of ammo.

The majority of enemies that you'll fight with Iron Man are tanks and helicopters, with some jet planes, missile platforms, flying drones and foot soldiers thrown in. In addition, each level has at least one boss that is a full magnitude tougher than the all the other enemies. The bosses are a mixture of high-tech military vehicles and super villains from the comic. In addition to battling the enemies, there are always secondary objectives like defending structures and avoiding civilian casualties. Clearing levels and meeting objectives earn you millions in game money that can be used to upgrade Iron Man's armor and unlock alternate versions between missions.

A man of iron, an army of one

Ironically, what Iron Man harkens back to, despite its fully 3-D world and all the free flying that you can direct Tony through, are the old-school side-scrolling games like Mario Brothers. This feeling comes from the design, which focuses on presenting the game in levels of increasing difficulty. You can't save in the middle of a level, but you can replay it, earning more money if you clear objectives that you missed on previous tries. You can just plow through for the sake of the story, but the emphasis of the design is on getting each level completely right and unlocking all the armors and all the components for them.

The iconic "move" in this game is catching missiles out of the air and directing them back at the machine (chopper, jet, tank, etc.) that launched them. You'll probably be pretty good at this maneuver by the end of the game because you'll get a lot of chances to practice it. Throughout most levels of the game, missiles simply rain down on Iron Man, particularly when he takes to the air. On the more difficult levels, simple survival requires a deft touch with the joystick, but on the easy level and with the armor's power set to life support, Tony can just wade through the fire.

Overall, the game is fun as a challenge and a chance to make lots of things explode. What it doesn't do is give you the immersive feel of "being" Iron Man. On the one hand, there is nothing interactive about the story elements, not even how much success you have in a mission makes any difference as to which cutscene plays. On the other hand, the same lightning response to the controls that the character needs to avoid all the ordnance thrown at him in the course of the game keeps you from feeling like you're directing a man encased in iron. It feels more like directing an agile plumber. As the millions of copies of scrolling games sold demonstrate, challenging players is a great thing for a game to do, but players should know that that's the sort of game they're getting into.