As is standard with all blockbuster films these days, it’s not complete without an accompanying video game tie-in.

Iron Man is this year’s first movie video game to hit the shelves, with it’s release in just five days time I thought I would take a look at the XBOX 360 to see if it’s any good (after all that’s what it’s for).

After navigating through the quite frankly beautiful title screen and the sleek inventory screens that hint at a much larger, potentially more tactical element to the game (which are blocked in the demo) we get treated to a cut scene of the Iron Stark (or Tony Man) gracefully fling over a nondescript desert.

When the action starts you are dropped right in the thick of it and your only objective is to blow the crap out of everything, and also to do it quickly because the demo only lasts for nine minutes. The time scale is frustratingly short and the demo will require multiple attempts before you will complete your objective, which felt like a cheap way of forcing me to play more than necessary. It doesn’t help that the controls are somewhat tricky to master and that you won’t really feel comfortable in Iron Man’s boots until the second or third go.

Offensively, the Mk III suit is equipped with your basic popcorn gun, missile barrage and chest busting unibeam, and if that doesn’t work you can rely on the good old fashion fisticuffs. As mentioned above the game hints at the ability to upgrades these weapons to suit you selected mission, another area that showed some promise the power distribution function which lets you reroute more power to four keys areas of your suit. These areas are Thrusters, Melee, weapons and Life support, again in this demo there are only hints as to their full potential with rerouting power only marginally improving these areas.

Within the nine minutes you are expected to fly to five evenly spread locations and destroy stolen stark Enterprises weapons caches which plays out as it sounds; fly to point A shot some stuff, fly to point B and shot some more, etc. The game shows potential, but with the time limit keeping the action short it’s difficult to get a proper feel for the game, hopefully the time limit isn’t a ploy to contain an otherwise drab game into short bursts of fun.