Aaah, smell that, kids? It's the smell of popcorn, newly opened toys and cold, hard cash! It's the smell of a blockbuster superhero movie and all its associated merchandise, marketing and money-making potential! We've all been gaming long enough to know that big movies = videogame tie-in, and so I think by this stage, we're probably comfortable enough with our opinions of this fact.

Some of us will shy away from these cash-cow games like they've got the plague or are wearing last season's fashions, while others will happily lay down their moolah to relive their favourite new film...or if we're honest, nab some easy Achievement points!

So with that said, I think we already know what to expect from the new Iron Man game from Sega: a plot that is fairly faithful to that of the film, some celebrity voiceovers and uncanny-valley likenesses, has decent enough visuals and audio, easy achievements and an easy, inoffensive, laid-back gameplay experience. So is Iron Man as predictable as that? Pretty much! Sure, it falls short in some key areas and excels at a few others, but on the whole, this is practically a textbook example of a big blockbuster movie's game tie-in.

Of course, like many offerings in this oft-reviled genre, the Iron Man game takes liberties with the film's plot, and also spoils it left, right and centre (so avoid this paragraph if you're yet to see the film!). Fans of Iron Man already know that Obadiah Stane becomes the villainous Iron Monger, so that's no biggie, but unless you're an iron-fan or have seen the movie, various developments in the game's story actually make very little sense. As a brief recap, you'll be playing Tony Stark, a billionaire playboy whose natural knack for inventions have helped made Stark Industries one of the most profitable weapons contractors in the country. While visiting US troops in Afghanistan to demonstrate his latest weapons, he is abducted by a terrorist group called the Ten Rings, who plan to force him to make them some weapons.

Instead, he cobbles together an armoured power-suit and fights his way to freedom, and it gives him the idea to take this prototype to the next level, which eventually becomes the Iron Man suit we all know and love. All the major plot-points of the film appear at some point and in some form in the game, as well as a bunch of new content designed to flesh out the game and give you a few more villains to tackle, including Whiplash and Titanium Man. Thankfully, the game is a lot more combat-heavy than the film was, rushing through the whole origin-story in two missions before dropping you into a series of increasingly tough confrontations with buyers of Stark weapons and groups like AIM.

One of Iron Man's key abilities is that he can hover and fly, and this will play a big part of the game. Although hand-to-hand combat is included in the form of a melee attack and the ability to grapple enemy units and vehicles, 90% of your time will be spent in the air. Flying and hovering around, attacking enemies with repulsors, the uni-beam and secondary weapons like grenades or missiles is what the Iron Man game is all about, and also where it hits its first real stumble. Put simply, the controls for the game are an acquired taste: some will take to them just fine and enjoy it, while others will probably curse the developers and write angry letters/forum posts. Truth is, they're fine and they get the job done, but they aren't great.

Flight is the main issue: hold down the left-bumper and Iron Man will fly forward, and then you have to control him with the left thumbstick, and yeah, it's pretty awkward. If you activate your afterburners for additional speed, it gets even more uncontrollable, and even if this sensation of trying to steer a rocket is what the developers were going for, it doesn't really translate into pure, unadulterated fun. Hovering is less troublesome: squeeze the left trigger and you'll hover at a consistent height; pull it all the way and you'll gain altitude. The game can be a bit finicky about which of these two states you're in, however, and this can be annoying. Although if you're a glass-half-full sort, being an unpredictably moving target is beneficial if you've got a dozen missiles or rockets flying towards you!

Other than that, the controls are alright: the auto-lock on can be a pain, but it does its best to ensure that you are always hitting *something*, which is better than...not. At its heart, Iron Man is an arcade shooter, so you'll basically just be holding down the right trigger anyway and pressing Y to unleash your secondaries whenever the cooldown expires. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of all is the uni-beam: the most devastating weapon is absolute overkill against anything but the bosses, and its immense drain on your energy reserves means you won't be using it often. In a nice touch, you can actually re-route your energy reserves to prioritise either life-support, weapons, thrusters or melee, which gives a nice performance boost to each of these categories and can be a real life-saver.

Better yet, somehow Stark's business acumen has allowed him to make obscene profits from destroying legions of his own weaponry and helping save the world – you'll net around $100m per mission – and these funds can be used to purchase upgrades to his Iron Man suit. It's not a terribly deep system: there's three tiers of upgrades for categories like power systems, repulsors, secondary weapons and mobility, and it gets progressively more expensive to buy the upgrades. If you purchase a tier, you'll be able to select one of two or three specific updates, which can trade off between power and accuracy, for example.

Each mission has a number of optional objectives which can net you more funds, including speed of victory, destroying X amount of enemies, and Hero objectives, which are basically secondary missions Stark can complete to save civilian lives. There's 13 missions in the game, and you'll probably have earned enough to max-out your suit's upgrades by around mission 10, but you can always replay a mission to complete any objectives you missed. On easy, the game is about as straightforward as you'd expect it to be and you can complete pretty much all objectives first-go, but the difficulty curves up pretty insanely on normal, especially in a couple of specific missions.

It needs to be said that boss-battles can often make or break a game, and Iron Man hovers dangerously close to the "break” side of that equation. It's not that they're overly difficult, more that some have got really cheap attacks that dish out huge damage, and others it just isn't clear exactly what you're supposed to be doing. The final battle is the worst for this: every time you "defeat” the boss his health replenishes, and it does this 4 or 5 times before Jarvis, your helpful and annoying A.I. assistant, announces he found a weakness that will allow you to end the fight. Prior to that, there's absolutely no indication that you're doing the right thing, and it's pretty sloppy design.

So depending on the difficulty you choose, Iron Man will either be a pretty enjoyable if forgettable 6-8 hour experience, or an 8-12 hour exercise in frustration. You can't change difficulties on the fly either: once you select one, you're stuck with it, and trying to change it erases all your progress. Beating certain missions will give you access to One-Man Army missions, which are basically just you vs. 80 enemies who need to be terminated in 10 minutes. Beating these unlocks variants of Iron Man's suit, including the likes of Hulkbuster, Silver Centurion and Extremis, but sadly none are usable in the main game until you beat the game and replay it. And even then, short of a few specific Achievements, there's little reason to replay the game at all, and none of the suits are really "better” than the Mark III; any improvements are balanced by reductions in other areas.

Visually, Iron Man is a pretty decent looking game. It features a lot of big, open environments to battle in, as well as hordes of enemies at any given time. The action is prone to some slow-down, and on the whole it actually feels a lot like the original Xbox game Battle Engine Aquila. It certainly won't win any awards for pushing the graphical limits of the Xbox 360, however, but it gets the job done and conveys the experience of being Iron Man well. The main criticism is that you tend to do most of your fighting from the air and at a distance, so much of the time you'll be just shooting at auto-locked reticules with little idea of what they are.

Things are much the same in the audio department: we're talking about functionality over flash here. The effects are fine, if a little repetitive by nature, and the music is suitably epic but totally forgettable. At least Robert Downey Jnr. And Terrence Howard voice their characters, and they do it well but the script is hardly an Oscar-winning effort. Bonus points should be awarded for actually featuring Black Sabbath's classic Iron Man song in the closing credits though!