Anybody who’s been here a while knows I’m a big fan of Stark Industries products, and I’ve been excited about this product since the first buzz for it hit Popular Mechanics a couple of years ago. We’ve been hearing that the future belongs to exoskeletons for a long time, and it seemed to me that if anybody was ever going to make it a working reality, it’d be the alpha bull engineers at SI.

Well… I’ve had the chance to try out the prototype, and it pains me to say it, but I must be honest: I found it disappointing.

The Facts

Billed as a “personal combat and safety vehicle” – because far be it from any marketing department to just say “battlesuit” – the newly dubbed Iron Man™ Mark I stands about seven feet tall with a six-foot-tall pilot (and so a bit shorter with my non-soldierly frame wedged into it), and can be adjusted to fit operators ranging in height from 5’7″ to 6’3″, according to the documentation. It’s armored with a proprietary metallic compound called (unsurprisingly) Starkite™ and carries a range of weapons intended, so they say, to give the individual combatant a decisive firepower advantage against conventional infantry. It’s also got a limited-range rocket-boosted flight system. (More about that in a bit.) They tell me it weighs 475 pounds with a full load of munitions (pilot’s weight not included).

Initial Impressions

Well, I’ll say this for the Mark I: it’s certainly imposing. With its hulking proportions and heavy armor, bristling with weapons, everything about its visual appearance at first glance says “bad news”. But then you look a little more closely… and that carefully crafted first impression starts to fall apart a little. The second thing you notice about the Mark I is how… unfinished it looks.

I mean, granted, it’s an engineering prototype, but this is Stark Industries we’re talking about. Even their technology proof-of-concept examples usually look as slick as other manufacturers’ finished products. This thing is just… junky-looking. There are visible welds, panels that don’t match, metal defects – hell, the helmet has a big ol’ dent in it. The cladding on the chest plate isn’t even symmetrical. The whole thing looks like it was assembled out of scrap metal and old weapons parts by a couple of desperate guys in a cave somewhere.

What’s worse, you can see wires and tubing that don’t seem to have been secured all that well peeking through gaps in the armor, and a closer inspection reveals that there are an awful lot of those. The front of the main body is very heavily armored, as are the long parts of the limbs, but very little attention seems to have been paid to protecting the joints, to say nothing of some of the vital systems. The drive mechanisms for the legs are almost entirely exposed, which would seem to me to be a pretty major problem in a mobile protective system. So is the computer system, which hangs off the back like those mysterious giant Sega Saturns on the backs of the robots in Virtual-On. The helmet has two giant, completely empty eyeholes that just invite an enemy sharpshooter to put a round into them, which would seriously inconvenience anybody whose head happened to be in there.

The View from Inside

The clunkiness doesn’t end with the Mark I’s appearance, either. Prepping it for action is a ridiculously involved process that requires the kind of crew normally associated with Formula I race cars. Medieval knights had less trouble (and needed less help, and took less time) putting on their armor than a man trying to get ready for a spin in the Mark I faces. What’s more, once they were in, they were probably more comfortable. I certainly wasn’t. All those rough edges and dubious quality decisions that are so obvious from the outside? They’re even more obvious from the inside. Wearing the Iron Man prototype feels a little like being dipped in hot tar and then having random machine parts stuck all over you while it’s still tacky.

The really amazing thing in this day and age, though, is that there’s no crew environment system whatsoever. Iron Man isn’t air conditioned; it isn’t even ventilated apart from those two giant eyeholes and a little ventilation slot at around mouth level. It has no NBC protection capability whatsoever. It’s not like there’s room behind that peforated face plate to wear a gas mask. There’s no place for a man to take a pee in there, either, which could rapidly become an emergency situation in the field, since it takes the better part of half an hour for the pit crew to get you out of the thing once you’re bolted into it. (I was very strongly cautioned not to pull an Al Shepard in there, as there are important electric supply cables involved in the leg locomotion system in that neighborhood – a comforting thought.)

Performance

Still, I have to admit, despite its many and mounting shortcomings, there’s a certain sense of invincibility involved once the suit is fully assembled and powered on. Actually operating it once it’s all ready to go isn’t difficult. Despite the suit’s greaet weight, once powered it carries its own bulk, so the operator doesn’t feel like he’s lugging 500 pounds of junk around on his back. The servo control system follows the operator’s movements, so there’s a slight delay that takes a little getting use to, but that’s quickly mastered, and from there on it’s smooth sailing. The servos have a tremendous feeling of power. You get the impression almost immediately that there’s not much – certainly no ordinary man-made structure – that can stand in your way, and the presence of so much heavy armor creates a feeling of invulnerability.

Unfortunately, this feeling is almost entirely illusory. In reality, you have more chinks in your armor wearing this thing than Tony Stark’s had supermodels, and what’s more, they’re mostly in places where it would be particularly awkward to get shot – the armpit, for instance, or the crotch, or (as previously mentioned) the eye. And though you don’t feel the suit’s weight, the suit sure does. Operating it is smooth and not all that difficult, but what it is is slow. It’s a little like working in about 200 feet of water wearing an old-timey Mark V hardhat diving rig (except the visibility is better in a Mark V). At its full walking (or, more accurately, lumbering) speed, a man on a bicycle could easily outrun Iron Man. This is not exactly a good thing when you’re such a big, shiny, obvious target.

That said, you do have quite a bit of power at your disposal, if you only get a chance to use it – but it’s tricky to find ways of doing that. You won’t be lifting much more than a normal man, for instance, because the suit has no power grippers. You can punch through a cinder block wall, thanks to a couple of cunningly designed overhangs on the forearms that protect the operator’s hands, but apart from that, you’re basically just wearing a pair of heavy leather welding gloves. An unencumbered human would have to really not be paying attention to get punched by someone wearing Iron Man, though. Ditto for the suit’s kicking power – impressive, but only of use against stationary targets. (Still, I have to admit it’s great fun to be able to kick a hole in the side of an APC. You just have to be careful not to snag any of the various poorly fitted sticky-out bits on the lower legs.)

Weapons

Well, okay, I hear you say, but the payoff must be in the suit’s incredible weapons load, right? Well… no, not really, because it’s not particularly well-armed. What’s more, the weapons it has seem like rather odd choices to me. It has a pair of flamethrowers – a strange decision in a suit that has no environmental sealing or air conditioning, I would think – and a small missile launcher that, on closer inspection, is nothing more than a LAAW cobbled into a forearm mounting. And… that’s it. No more precise antipersonnel weapons, no sophisticated defense system, nothing.

But then, it can’t really have anything more precise than that, because it doesn’t have anything to control a precision weapon with. That helmet I was talking about earlier? There’s nothing in it but the pilot’s head. The computer on the back runs the movement control system, and once it’s operational there’s no way for the suit’s operators to interface with it at all. It’s booted up by somebody else with a laptop, who then uncables and takes it away. There’s no way for the operator to check the suit’s status, no targeting system of any kind… nothing. There are no electronics or sensors whatsoever. Not even the most rudimentary of instruments for the flight system.

Which brings us to the flight system. Calling it a flight system is really a considerable linguistic indulgence. It’s a launch system, certainly – the two rocket boosters built into the suit’s legs generate a combined total of about 2,500 pounds of thrust, more than sufficient to make the machine airborne. However, the suit’s design pays not even faint lip service to the idea of getting down again in anything like a controlled manner. You just sort of assume a ballistic trajectory, and once the rocket goes up, who cares where it comes down? That is apparently not Mr. Stark’s department. My company minder advised me that if I wanted to try that system out, I should make sure I was facing the ocean first, and let him know in advance so he could have a rescue swimmer in the water. I passed.

Conclusions

Okay, I have to admit, there’s a lot of potential in the Iron Man prototype. Its basic engineering is impressive and its power source is nothing short of revolutionary. But right now that’s all it is – potential. The execution is just so poor that anything potentially cool about the design is lost in the awfulness of it all. In a Stark Industries product, this kind of sloppiness and crudity is shocking.

To his credit, Tony Stark seems to realize that. He insisted several times, while his pit crew was prying me out of the thing at the end of the demonstration, that he’s working on a much-improved version and that he won’t go to production until he’s sure he’s got it right.

He’s got a lot of work to do.

Slower, but more heavily armored than the Iron Man armor, Stealth Operations Suit the [sic] boasts a much broader array of weapons, from repulsor rays to rocket launchers. Jim Rhodes pilots it on missions too sensitive for the high profile Iron Man to tackle.

Yep, that’s War Machine, pretty much. Apparently they don’t mean “stealth operations” so much as “deniable operations”, though one questions how deniable it is when it’s carried out by a guy who looks just like Iron Man except for his color scheme and some additional weapons. It’s been pointed out to me by a friend that, like chain-exclusive figures since the dawn of the practice (about, what, 10-15 years ago now), it’s mainly just a repaint of a toy designed for the regular mass market – in this case the standard Iron Man Mk III figure (depicting the “finished” suit that appears on most of the movie’s promotional materials).

Still, it’s surprising what a difference a color scheme makes. The movie suit’s helmet looks kind of War Machiney anyway, mostly in the way the “mouth” part of the mask comes together (though I wish they’d bothered to at least remold the figure’s head slightly to include the laser designator), and when it’s rendered in black and silver instead of red and gold, it looks considerably different. The overall effect is kind of “What if War Machine had been designed by Adi Granov?” – which is pretty much what they were going for. (Mind you, Adi Granov was probably all of ten years old when the War Machine suit first appeared.)

A few years ago, the trend in action figures was to mold them in dynamic action poses that pretty much rendered them unposeable. They still had articulation, but they were molded in such a way that if you moved them into any position other than the one they were packed in, they just looked ridiculous. Fortunately, that trend has partially abated now. This figure does suffer from it to a small extent – the legs are designed to suit the pose it’s packaged in and look a little odd in other positions – but nowhere near as bad as some earlier figures (early McFarlane Toys figures, for instance). It’s about the same height as, but oddly, much sleeker than, the earlier Marvel Legends War Machine figure, making it seem like it’s in an entirely different scale bracket when the height indicates otherwise.

And, as I had hoped, the articulation in this smaller figure is considerably improved over the larger Repulsor Power Iron Man (previously reviewed). This guy has ball and pivot hip and shoulder joints, double-hinge knees and elbows, a small amount of wrist and ankle articulation, and a working neck, plus a strangely positioned torso rotator (it’s not at his waist, but rather about halfway up his chest). Some of his joints are a bit hard to work because of interactions with other joints – it’s difficult, for instance, to make his upper legs rotate without twisting his hip joints, which can foul up the way they swing outward – but that’s always the price you pay for having more joints on an action figure in the first place.

Of course, War Machine wouldn’t be War Machine, even by another name, without his trusty shoulder-mounted missile rack and Gatling-style minigun, and the mold on this guy has been altered from the standard Mk III with the addition of a couple of sliding mounts for these two accessories, so that they can be moved to their stowed position on his back. This is a major improvement from the way these weapons were handled on the Marvel Legends figure, where the missile box was a) too small and b) attached in such a way that it flipped up, not back, and the minigun wasn’t on a flexible mount at all, just pegged onto his shoulder. On this figure, it’s pretty easy to pop them off of their mounts when trying to slide them, but they go right back on. They each have a spring gimmick that fires the “fake muzzle blast”-style missiles that are de rigueur these days; that particular design trend doesn’t impress me much, but since they’re missiles, they can be removed for display easily enough (so that he doesn’t look like he’s freeze-framed in the middle of shooting).

The downside is that the, where the shoulder weapons are handled wrong on the older figure and right on the new one, the exact opposite is true of the distinctive War Machine wrist cannons. On the older figure they’re molded right to his forearms. On this one, they’re a pair of bulky, ill-fitting snap-on bits. Also, his shoulder caps aren’t attached – they’re just kind of sitting there, held on by friction – so it’s very easy to knock them right off while trying to get the wrist bits attached.

Still, for what it is – a hastily-arranged repaint of an existing figure to use as a chain exclusive – Stealth Operations Suit does a pretty good job. The mounts for the shoulder weapons are very nicely done, and it looks different enough (and enough like the character it’s supposed to represent) that the effort isn’t a completely hollow one. (This is in sharp contrast to the “Repulsor Red Prototype” Target exclusive, which, as far as I can tell, is just the Mk III with the gold bits painted silver instead. Despite what the color scheme suggests, it’s not even a faint attempt at emulating the “Silver Centurion” suit, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Of all the currently announced movie toys I haven’t seen yet, the one I’m looking forward to most is the Iron Man Mk I figure, if only because the Stan Winston guys did a tremendous job on that prop and I’m eager to see how good a job the Hasbro designers did at replicating it in action figure form.

Twice.

So you might expect that I’d either be looking forward to the movie with a barely contained passion… or dreading it utterly. After all, there have been some damn fine superhero movies, and, uh, some not-so-fine ones.

Well, the trailers for Iron Man look pretty damn good – and don’t have anything to do with the brain-damaged bull they’re shoveling over in the comics these days – so I’m excited. And even if it wasn’t any good, it might produce some cool toys. Most of the first round of movie toys hasn’t reached this part of the universe yet, which isn’t all that surprising, but the area’s Wally Worlds do have at least one of the early ones in.

Repulsor Power Iron Man is a sizeable toy – he stands 12 inches high – but his articulation level is a bit disappointing, especially for a figure this size. Except for his neck, he has only simple swivel joints at shoulders and hips and basic hinges at elbows and knees. That’s it. He doesn’t even have a waist joint (presumably because his torso is stuffed full of a speaker and the control module for the speech feature), and both of his arms have to be rigid from the elbows down to accommodate the gimmicks built into his hands (the left one has a light-up repulsor in the palm, the right fires a plastic missile that’s supposed to be molded to look like a repulsor blast), but why the rest of him is so immobile, I don’t know; maybe just to keep the price down after the cost of the electronics.

Apart from the light-up palm, RP Iron Man has three main electronic gimmicks:

• Pushbutton-activated speech. His unibeam (that round bit on his chest, for you uninitiated types) is actually a button. Pressing it causes the button to light up yellow and the toy to say one of four things: “I am Iron Man!” (predictably, though at least he isn’t doing an Ozzy impression), “Repulsor blasts!” (followed by a repulsor sound effect – this one also makes his left palm light up), “Target engaged!” and “Auxiliary power!”
• Arm movement thingy. Basically, if you wave his left arm around, it makes the palm light up and elicits either one repulsor blast, a series of them, or the “Repulsor blasts!” (pew pew) sound option from the chest button. I assume because of the wire connecting the motion sensor and the light to the core of the electronic gadgetry in the chest, his shoulder only rotates through 180°.
• Boot jet sound effects. This one doesn’t work the way it says on the package, at least on the one I have. The package says if you tilt the heel of his right boot up, it plays a “boot jets start up” noise, followed by looped “flight” sounds that are interrupted by “swooping” noises if you move the toy around in the air, and you turn them off by tilting the same bootheel down, which plays a “shutdown” noise. On mine, the heel only tilts up, so it’s up for on, then up again for off. It’s quite easy to set this off by mistake, so it’s a good thing there’s a switch on his back that turns the electronics off. (It has a third setting, the one the toy is packaged in, which disables the boot and arm triggers and restricts the chest button to two of the four sounds.)

On the plus side, it’s a nice sculpt. It looks a lot like the Adi Granov/”Mark III” design featured in the bits of the movie trailer that come from (at a guess) the last half or so of the film, so if you like that design, you’re golden, and the large scale allows for a lot of detail. The only real downside is that his very restricted articulation means there’s really no good display position for his arms – since they’re molded permanently in a “repulsors firing” pose, putting them at his sides looks weird and the only other really viable pose makes him look like he’s surrendering. (Well, and if you had an appropriately sized globe and some Fun-Tac, you could turn him into a statue of Atlas, I suppose.)

All in all, a little disappointing, if only because over the last few years I’ve been spoiled by the dramatic advances in action figure articulation technology. This guy’s only a little more poseable than the original 3-1/2″ Star Wars figures. In a 12″ figure, these days, you tend to expect a bit more. On the other hand, I’ve seen catalog entries for (but no pictures of, yet) other 12″ toys from this series, so maybe those, lacking electronics to accommodate, will do a little better on the “action” front. Also, the smaller figures in the line look promising on paper, though I haven’t seen them in person yet.