Superman Returns review (PlayStation 2)

Superman videogames have a terrible, terrible past.

There's not been one which has risen beyond the status of 'passable/okay', with most of them being so catastrophic that not even the man of steel could save them from a diabolical fate. Yet developers keep on trying, bless 'em. It was inevitable that a game version of Bryan Singer's generally good Superman movie would emerge to try one more time and lift Supes' reputation from the dark dark murk of games past, but the odds are not good.

I still itch when I think about Superman 64. *shudder*

Up up and away

Things get off to a good enough start to banish the memory of that Nintendo 64 travesty. Using the film as a springboard, EA's title kicks you into gear straight off with the titular superhero hovering around Metropolis being introduced to some of his powers via the voice of his departed father, Jor-El. The city teems with people and cars going about their business as you learn to fly around, taking it all in.

Soon things get a little more hectic however, as a meteor shower threatens to turn Superman's adopted home into smoking rubble. So you're quickly called into action to display some offensive abilities, such as ice breath and heat vision. Between destroying the falling rocks and saving on-fire buildings with your super breath it's all quite a good laugh… at first.

Once this brief tutorial is over, the game starts moving you towards the movie plot. The man of steel has disappeared for a duration in an effort to see if his home planet of Krypton still exists, leaving Earth to fend for itself. It's during this early stage the developers have decided to make use of Superman's absent years to engage in battles not in the film. Nothing wrong with that per se; bar Lex Luthor, Singer's movie is quite absent of super villains and as such a game mimicking it closely would have probably come off dull. So the appearance of Mongul, Metallo, Bizarro and others is welcome. However, it's the execution not the ideas where the game starts to fall apart. And it doesn’t take someone with x-ray vision to see these flaws, either.

Not looking so super now, are we?

Naturally it's the visuals that come under critical gaze first. For a start, Superman himself isn’t well designed or animated, coming off stiff and rather zombie-like. This only gets worse in battle, where he skits and chops all over the place making it a rather haphazard (and comedic) array of graphics. Environments suffer from poor textures and the camera does its level best to obscure things from you, forcing a swift thumb to take over via the second analogue stick. This wouldn’t be so bad if the gameplay held up to forgive the graphical grievances, but it's this aspect that Superman Returns commits the greatest of crimes.

Initially it seems a great deal of fun. You get to fly around areas and explore when you have time to, and there's a nice feeling of magnitude and majesty that many Superman games lack. The power scale of the character is captured nicely too as he breaks the sound barrier with super speed, recovers health and is generally invincible. Indeed, most of Supes' parameters of success and failure depend on the survival and happiness of others. Fighting in an arena, for example, you have to keep the bloodthirsty hoards entertained as well as defeat your foes, while in Metropolis saving people and averting catastrophes is the only way to succeed.

It's a good idea that allows the creators to stay true to the source material while providing a challenge and means of mission failure. But as I said earlier, it's not the ideas here that are bad…

Herein lies the problem: nearly all these neat ideas are hamstrung by god-awful implementation. Flying is a pain after a while because of the camera issues, especially when using super speed as Supes is damn near uncontrollable. This also means when getting from point A to B you'll be bouncing off buildings and generally being less of a hero and more of an ungraceful lump.

Fighting? Well there's tons of combos that allow you to throw enemies into structures, slam them into the ground and all this other cool stuff that would be fun… if it was actually done well. But aiming your attacks is obscenely hard at times because the lock on mode is just plain bad, especially with multiple opponents. Scrapping is equally difficult to do effectively because the collision detection is so atrocious, and ranged combat is often either ineffective or utterly boring. And it only gets worse.

Enemies themselves are either AI lacking dummies or unbelievably cheap, with repetitive and annoying attacks. Some of the bosses are particularly guilty of the latter, relying on unimaginative and sometimes actually invisible (thanks to the wonderful graphics!) energy blasts to put you down again and again. Hell, even if you're not engaging some of the big bads directly, some of the objectives related to them are terribly vague to the point of you having to randomly use your powers to work out what the heck you're supposed to be doing. Which, as you can imagine, is crazy fun when the controls are so unwieldy. The poor man of steel can't even jump – he's either flying/hovering or not. And don’t even think about trying to land on command. This game… it burns, oh god, how it burns.

The Death of Superman

But the glory doesn’t end there. Oh no no no. The game design is also the stuff of legends. Lengthy battles ending with either another fight or a sub mission are feared because you can ace the first part that took you 20 minutes, but should you fail the second you're sent all the way back to the start of the whole thing. Quality. Fancy an extra challenge? Well some superfluous text sometimes stays on the screen to block your vision during an objective. Excellent!

It's all just too much to take. And what makes it seem like even more of a lost opportunity is that there are parts where Superman Returns is actually… enjoyable. Really. They're very small and rare moments, but they crop up in brief minutes amidst hours of tedium where you feel a little like Superman. Trashing bad guys in a fancy fashion while the excellent soundtrack (which is suitably dramatic and bombastic) plays in the background. There are even some sub-games that work well. And although Brandon Routh's main man sounds bored out of his skull, most of the voice acting isn’t that bad.

But those moments are fleeting rafts in an ocean of terrible, terrible gameplay. Superman Returns isn’t as bad as Superman 64, but by Krypton at times you wonder if that was the benchmark because it comes dangerously close. Lex Luthor should take tips because it seems the videogame industry has the exclusive guaranteed method on how to make the man of steel look super feeble. 'Up up and away', indeed.