Superhero games, just like superhero movies, must perch on a precarious ledge: Please the fanboys and stay true to the source material, but not be so steeped in geeklore that the masses gag and flee in terror.

How odd, then, that SEGA's videogame take on Marvel's golden avenger straddles that ledge gracefully … and then gets blown off by dicey controls and seriously unimaginative mission design.

Don't don the armor expecting movie redux. Robert Downey Jr. and Terrence Howard provide somewhat wooden voice work to the proceedings, but the movie's plot is broken up by copious missions featuring cameos by Shellhead standbys like the Controller and Whiplash. This is a good, good thing — in fact, Fanboy Nation may end up wishing that some of these villains had made it into the film instead of Iron Monger. (Hello, "Iron Man 2.")

Conceptually, Iron Man gets a lot of things right. Earning cash in missions allows you to pay for cool upgrades to various parts of your armor — you can add cannon-blast capabilities to your repulsors, or upgrade to the signature red and gold Mark III armor. You can use the D-pad to toggle between using specific upgrades during combat, and that's clever, too.

The rest of the game's control scheme seems to have been designed by Tony Stark on a drunken bender. The aerial controls are wonky and challenging to master — hovering's easy enough, but doing multiple things at once, like flying and powering up a devastating uniblast, requires contorting your paws into pretzels.

Thanks to an uber-generous auto-targeting system, Shellhead's actually a lot more dangerous on the ground than he is in the air — it's literally possible to obliterate enemies who are several football fields away and no larger than an ant on-screen. Of course, this doesn't feel so great when you realize that they respawn as fast as ants, too. Nearly all the missions follow the kill-the-grunts/beat-the ultrapowered-boss-formula, and they quickly come to feel both repetitive and tedious: In one mission, I spent what felt like an eternity trading missiles with a warbird helicopter — it wouldn't die, and neither would I, despite the fact that each of us took multiple direct hits.

Oh, and did I mention that there are no in-mission checkpoints?

At the end of the day, Iron Man feels like a game that's one or two mid-sized tweaks away from taking a place in the small pile of quality superhero-videogames, alongside Activision's Spiderman 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. If SEGA starts developing Iron Man 2, oh, say, yesterday, they'll be in time for the sequel.

Contact Aaron Conklin through features@madison.com.