Iron Man and Tony Stark are conduits of chaos. Virtual reality is a medium that demands comfort and sophistication. Iron Man VR attempts control of both worlds, combining Iron Man's breakneck speed and giddying repulsors with the crafted elegance of a maturing medium. The product is a confident and convincing presentation of Iron Man, albeit one that feels limited by its budget and hardware.
Iron Man VR really goes for it. It could have passed as a tightly controlled rail-shooter, a narrative adventure, or a good-enough flight simulator with some action elements. Instead, Camouflaj’s take on Iron Man combines dynamic 360-degree freedom of movement with frenzied shooting mechanics and tasks players with performing both at the same time. When Iron Man VR began I couldn’t believe what it was asking me to do. By the time I was finished I was amazed it allowed me go as far as I did.
A game like Iron Man VR would have been unimaginable four years ago. At the inception of consumer virtual reality, movement and locomotion were problems without true solutions. They’re better today, but still subject to pratfalls of motion sickness, living room practicality, and the inconvenience of attaching a bunch of equipment to your head. Iron Man VR, through two Move controllers, uses the physical position of the controllers and their specific angles to not only control thrust action, but also the direction and type of weaponry being deployed. It’s a lot of responsibility assigned to Sony’s measures of control that, for lack of a better phrase, are worst-in-class in their field. Over the course of its five-to-six hours, players should be able to take Iron Man from a blundering goofball to, well, Iron Man.
Iron Man VR opens with a stamp of authenticity. Tony Stark, in a blacked out voiceover, asks the player, what do you get for the man with everything? And then he answers his own question: a chance to give back. Neon lines then form the inner shell of Iron Man’s helmet, then the two eyes pieces come forward and ignite with blue light before revealing a twilight beachfront. You feel like god damn Iron Man before you even move. This sequence is a tiny segment of a much larger experience, but it speaks to Iron Man VR’s primary objective. You are Iron Man and the entire world is constructed to facilitate this fantasy.
You are also, of course, Tony Stark. It’s difficult to tell where Iron Man VR fits inside of Iron Man’s larger continuity, but suffice to say Tony has laid down his arms and vowed to never make a weapon again. This pleases his partner Pepper Potts and seems to disappoint his cohorts in Shield. It also demands the shutdown of Tony’s AI assistant, Gunsmith, who is disappointed in Tony’s newfound pacifism. Three years later, circumstances demand Tony respond to the threat of violence with his own unique violence and bring Gunsmith out of retirement.
The remainder of Iron Man VR is a mixture of classic comic book storytelling and righteous villainy. Tony’s cadence and sense of humor seem to borrow heavily from Robert Downy Jr’s interpretation of Marvel’s classic character. Tony’s other AI assistant, Friday, is Iron Man VR’s brightest costar, and both Friday and the pair of antagonists, Ghost and The Living Laser, are great foil for Tony’s poignant resolutions and smartass quips. There’s a boiling tragedy inside of every iteration of Tony Stark, and, while Iron Man VR doesn’t cover any new ground with his character, it does a bang up job with the tools at its disposal.
Flight is, of course, how Iron Man covers the most ground. Aerial maneuvering is a tricky endeavor. Finding the correct angles to align your wrists involves a lot of trial-and-error, so much that I hadn’t worked all the kinks out until a canyon chase late in the game. It demands synchronization of head tracking, wrist placement, and manipulating the camera angle with the Move’s face buttons. I struggled to rapidly lose altitude, quickly get behind opponents, and maintain any sort of smoothness with my flight path. I made it work—in some sequences Iron Man VR feels like it has an invisible hand that guides the player away from frustration—but it took me a while to get there. It’s not especially friendly to someone who wants to pick-up-and-play and instantly have a good time.
Operating Iron Man’s repulsors (read: guns) requires a similar set of skills. Showing your palms fires standard blasts, both attached to individual cool down timers. Bending a wrist down deploys one of six auxiliary weapons, ranging from lock-on missiles to smart bombs. There aren’t any sequences in Iron Man VR where flying while shooting are required to pass, but that kind of demanding efficiency can certainly help with ratings issued at the end of each level or challenge. Given the difficulty of Iron Man’s full tilt operation, Camouflaj was wise not to raise the skill ceiling especially high.
Levels break down into a handful of recognizable archetypes. Iron Man will be tasked with soaring around the skies of the Shield Helicarrier, through an evacuated downtown Shanghai, or around the coast his Malibu mansion. Ghost, having taken control and modified Tony Stark’s retired drone army, deploys several different types of modded drones. Revenants charge a massive beam and can only be attacked from behind after it fires. Skulls bounce Iron Man around and pack their own firepower. Wights shield and support other drones. Different configurations and combinations of Ghost’s drones compose the bulk of Iron Man VR’s opposition.
The challenge comes in defeating the drones efficiently while paying attention to Iron Man’s regenerating health. I found engaging Iron Man’s melee attack, which comes with a sweet three-hit combo, to have the best bang-for-buck, but deploying repulsors until they were empty, switching over to smart missiles, all while zipping around skyscrapers for cover, is wildly enthralling experience. Iron Man VR asks a lot from the player, but, especially compared to something like Megaton Rainfall), has enough nuance behind its control to allow a true sense of agency alongside a god-like presence.
A progression system provides an incentive to do your best. Getting five stars on a mission grants Research points that can be spent upgrading the suit in Tony’s garage. The suit’s capacitor, for example, can be switched between powering-up basic shots to powering up the unibeam to providing emergency counter measures. The chassis and repulsors can be adjusted as well. Iron Man VR has enough options to allow for two completely different builds on standby, although I preferred to stick to the mods I liked the most rather than fiddle around with different configurations. Friday and Gunsmith will also provide additional motion-based obstacle course and wave-based survival levels to crank out more points, should you want more action.
My primary complaint with Iron Man VR is I didn’t feel compelled to take that option. I didn’t want to play more than the twelve chapters it gave me. I loved what was there, but it felt like every level went on maybe 20% longer than it needed to. There was always one extra wave of drones, or one more pursuit through a canyon, or one more phase of a (fairly inventive) boss fight. Coupled with monstrous load times—and repeatedly sitting through those load times when I couldn’t keep up in that canyon chase—and I was good with ending my time in Iron Man VR after it credits rolled past. I liked riding the roller coaster but I got tired of waiting in line for it.
It all speaks to the faults in Sony’s aging hardware and the instability of virtual reality’s current space in gaming. Iron Man VR is a top-tier title from Sony, following similar first-party efforts with Blood & Truth and Astro Bot Rescue Mission. Sony continues to carve out a budget for virtual reality games over virtual reality experiences, and yet it’s a format with no clear future or successor. Iron Man VR feels like another step toward a conclusion that may not ever happen. It’s important progress (and a tremendous improvement for Camouflaj after the ambitious but flawed République project), but with the aging PlayStation VR hardware, outrageous load times, and daunting skill ceiling, Iron Man VR may be etching its name into a plaque no one will bother to hang.
Iron Man and Tony Stark are conduits of chaos. Virtual reality is a medium that demands comfort and sophistication. Iron Man VR attempts control of both worlds, combining Iron Man’s breakneck speed and giddying repulsors with the crafted elegance of a maturing medium. The product is a confident and convincing presentation of Iron Man, albeit one that feels limited by its budget and hardware.
