Superman Returns

Krypton-factor

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Games based on films turn out to be rubbish 97% of the time, and that ladies and gentlemen is a fact!* Honestly; I've done hours and hours of extensive research into it and the figures all add up to that single indisputable fact. It's not always the developers fault, by the very nature of the licence people buy such games wanting in some way to experience an interactive version of the film forgetting that more often than not that kind of thing would make a pretty rotten game. Films and games are different and trying to use one to recreate the other is a recipe for disappointment. So what's a self respecting game developer to do when presented with a triple A film license starring one of the most recognisable American icons of the last hundred years and told to make a game out of it? The sensible answer, with the benefit of hindsight, may well have been to pretend that they never got the email and to not answer the phone until the nasty man from Hollywood stops calling. Unfortunately for them, and more importantly the gaming public, EA decided to jump at the chance of easy money and out of that brash decision comes the gaming abomination that is Superman Returns.

It's hard to know where to start in finding things wrong, but my initial misgivings over the game started right from the first screen. The game menu appears over an in-game engine generated scene of Superman hovering a few feet off the ground in the middle of Metropolis while the camera spins around him. Unfortunately, rather than instilling a sense of grandeur or awe at seeing Superman in such a heroic pose my attention was drawn far more to the horrible character model, the featureless buildings, the deserted streets and perhaps most unforgiving of all, the dreadful physics of his cloak! This is Superman people, the player is going to spend the entirety of the game looking at the man's back, the least you can do is make the damn cape look convincing! But no, instead it hangs stiffly from his neck defying all laws of gravity by falling a good six inches away from his shoulders rather than resting on them as every cape I've ever worn (ahem...) seemed to do naturally.

Things never recover from that bad start, in-fact if possible they get worse. I could go on for ages about how it appears whoever made the CGI clips that come between missions and whoever wrote the rest of the game clearly have never talked, while the CGI tries, at least at times, to follow events of the film a little and uses the voices of the talented cast to do so the game itself bares absolutely no relation to the film at all (to the point where neither Lex Luthor or Lois Lane actually appear in game at all), which must be some kind of first for a film licence. I could also mention how for a Superman game, especially one so clearly stuck for ideas, not at any point using the classic Superman plot devices of saving Lois Lane from some kind of danger or having the secret of Clark Kent's identity threatened seems like a massive oversight, in fact not having Clark Kent involved at all is a little weird. I could point out that for a character with such a detailed history and a well stocked rogues gallery of fiendish enemies making the final in-game boss a massive tornado of all things seems to be devaluing the characters history just a tad. However, all the strange plotting and dodgy design choices could have been a minor irritant if the game under it all was as much fun as 'being' Superman surely should be. Guess what. It isn't!

As was to be expected Superman Returns sees you take on Superman's traditional role as protector of Metropolis, a central concept that allowed EA make the single interesting design choice offered in the game when they came to the clever realisation that seeing as how you're Superman, and therefore virtually indestructible it's the city itself and not you that has the on-screen health meter. Your job is to keep the city 'alive' and protect it from the many disasters it faces over the course of the game. What that amounts to in reality is flying around from place to place killing bad guys, putting out fires, destroying asteroids, protecting zeppelins, etc., with the occasional boss battle thrown in for a bit of variety. In the right hands such a game design has the potential to be a lot of fun its just a shame that in this case its really not. The one thing any Superman game really needs to get right is the controls, flying Superman around should to be easy and feel just right or else everything that comes after it will be a chore. To be fair to EA they almost get it right, actually flying around the city is almost fun and winding in and out of buildings at high speed can be an exhilarating pleasure for a few minutes. However, all the fun stops when you actually try and accomplish anything while you're airborne. With a bewildering camera and Superman's awkwardly controlled ability for 360 degree midair movement simply keeping track of targets becomes a fiddly nightmare and firing off a superpower like heat vision at the same time almost requires a third hand. None of it is made any easier by the fact that Superman is always either flying at top speed or stationary in mid air, there is no acceleration/brake effect which makes tracking and moving target nearby next to impossible. Things don't get much better when Supes is on the ground either, the melee combat is button bashing at its worst and while combos are unlocked as you go through the game it feels strangely retro to be remembering long button sequences in this day and age.

The missions themselves are some of the most uninspired around, something that is almost an achievement considering the wealth of history and lore surrounding the lead character, especially as the developers clearly didn't feel constrained by having to keep within the contents of the film. After the brief tutorial level which does it's job of familiarising you with the controls to the degree that you can already see how awful they are you suddenly find yourself taking part in some kind of gladiatorial combat in a kind of domed arena on a distant planet (why or where exactly are honestly both unimportant and unexplained) before you're suddenly back in Metropolis continuing the fight against evil with round after round of random combat missions against a repetitive menagerie of robots, mechs, dragons and mutants all of which serve the sole purpose of boosting your XP to a level where the next dull boss encounter kicks in. Never does the game give any of your actions any kind of point, no in-game story evolves to give you a reason to keep fighting and soon enough it just all becomes so monotonous.

While there is a small amount of credit due to EA for getting a whole large'ish city squeezed into the PS2 like this after a few minutes of flying around the virtually empty streets in-between bland identikit skyscrapers you'll be wishing they'd not bothered. The rest of the graphics are average at best with unimpressive character models and barely functional animation. The all star vocal cast boasted at in the advertising are spectacularly wasted seeing as how most of their characters never feature in anything other than weirdly unrelated CGI and Brandon Routh's bored sounding Superman does nothing to lift your spirits in-game either.

What's almost impressive about the whole thing is that such a travesty of a game was actually delayed for six months to get it up to scratch, the mind boggles at what kind mess would have been pushed onto shelves had the original release date been hit. It'd be nice to think that somewhere, eventually there will be a decent Superman game, his legions of fans deserve a game they can enjoy, but at the moment Superman Returns is really not the answer to their prayers.

*probably....

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By Paul Newcombe