Iron Man feels like a perfect fit for virtual reality. In the movies, Tony Stark’s advanced armor operates like VR, with a virtual screen projected inside his helmet. So when I put on my PSVR headset and started playing Iron Man VR I felt like that famous, armor-wearing superhero. Unfortunately, I didn’t have to just contend with super-villains. Technical problems ended up ruining much of my excitement and enjoyment.
Iron Man VR is, as the name implies, a virtual reality game that is built for the PSVR headset and motion controllers. In it, you play as Tony Stark, the famous billionaire who once ran a weapons company, but became a crime-fighting superhero who wears a powerful mech suit. Iron Man VR isn’t set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but is heavily inspired by those films. Tony Stark in both the game and the MCU has a large ego, is quick to spit out a joke and seems to be hiding a lot of guilt over his weapon selling past. His home in the game has a near-identical layout to the MCU version of Stark’s Malibu mansion. Even his suit not only looks like the MCU Iron man suit, but has the same sound effects and abilities. This is good. It helped me get lost in the world more, as it is a world I’m very familiar with.
The setup for this Iron Man tale is the sudden appearance of the teleporting villain Ghost, who begins causing havoc in Tony’s life. So Stark reactivates The Gunsmith, a dangerous AI built before he was a superhero, to help him fight back. Gunsmith is a super-advanced weapon-building and combat-training AI that uses a Tony Stark hologram as its avatar. While Gunsmith is effective and helpful, his brash and dangerous plans often cause more headaches and problems for Tony and his more peaceful suit-based AI, Friday. The family dynamics among the three are the core of the story.
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