There is a lot of movie tie-in games out there. Not so much these days, but when I was a kid every movie seemed to have a damn video game counterpart. Superman Returns stuck with me after all these years because there were some ideas that could have been awesome, and maybe if done now could have been astounding.
The story of the game for Superman Returns doesn’t really follow the movie- at all. The fact Superman comes back to Earth and Lex Luthor is doing something naughty is pretty much where the similarities end. Somehow he finds himself in a Colosseum in space in a fight with Mongul , which is weirdly the tutorial. You escape and go to Earth where you fight Bizzaro, Metallo, and that little creepy inter-dimensional guy no one but a true comic geek can even pronounce let a lone spell while Luthor does build up stuff to a create a bunch of evil tornadoes…this is the story in a nutshell.
Playing as Superman in a open world isn’t perfect but I have to give the game credit, it works remarkably damn well. You get heat vision, super breath, freeze breath, super speed, flight, and strength and for the most part, they work really well. I like how you really can’t die but you can get weakened but the closer you get to sun, the stronger you get. What does have a health bar is Metropolis itself, which is a fair idea but damn it’s a pain in the ass to maintain. The fights you get into cause a lot of collateral damage. Actual fighting I think sucks. Your vision powers aren’t really effective against enemies on there own and the combos you can do aren’t great but alright. The game never feels fluid, it feels clunky and that hurts the Bizarro fight for example. The final boss is a huge letdown. There is fun here but after a few hours it gets old and repetitive fast. May the gaming gods bring you glory.
One thought on “Superman returns: the game”