Anyone who knows anything about Superman knows he's invulnerable to almost anything, except kryptonite. Seasoned video game players know his weaknesses also extend to game representations, with the Nintendo 64's ""Superman"" commonly proclaimed as one of the worst games of all time.
The latest attempt at bringing the Man of Steel to a console comes in the form of the movie tie-in game ""Superman Returns,"" and almost succeeds, but gets killed by a kryptonite thorn in its side for being too short.
Tasked with creating a unique superhero game, developer EA Tiburon, most known for the ""Madden"" series, found a measure of success by giving Superman a ""Grand Theft Auto""A-A--style of gameplay. This allows players to travel around Metropolis through 80 square miles of city. Sure, ""Spider-Man 2"" also had this level of interactivity, but that game faltered under the weight of bad controls and boring bosses, areas where ""Superman Returns"" succeeds.
The excellent control allows such mainstay powers as fast flight, superhuman strength, ice breath and heat vision to flow together really well. The game's engine allows players to freeze an enemy in mid-air, fly toward it and smack it into the ground, all in one fell swoop. Couple this excellent control with a beat-em-up style reminiscent of ""Final Fight,"" and the fighting aspect actually trumps many GTA-style games.
Like ""Spider-Man 2,"" there are a limited number of normal bad guys, however the scale of the boss fights easily trumps Spidey. Massive boss battles with enemies such as Metallo, Bizarro and Mongul mix action and puzzle solving into a cohesive package that did not exist in Spider-Man.
Sadly, the game does go by faster than a speeding bullet—even a non-gamer could overcome every obstacle in the game in well under 10 hours. An additional chapter with a new boss could have extended the game time, or even offering Xbox Live compatibility would have upped the replay value.
Instead of going with these features, EA Tiburon included two ultimately pointless styles of minigames. In one, Superman races against Mr. Mxyzptlk, but since it nets nothing, many people will avoid it. The other style of minigame is much more interesting, because players get to play as Bizarro and destroy Metropolis instead of saving it. This does provide a fun five minutes, but again, it adds little to the story, and it is also utterly worthless.
Another aspect of the game that falls through is on the story side. For those who did see the movie, they might recognize Lex Luthor's attempts to create an island of kryptonite, but this plotline gets hidden among the other boss battles and only occasionally mentioned. While this confusion does not sink the game, it is disappointing, even more so, because the movie's cast— including Kevin Spacey and Brandon Routh—contributed voiceovers for the game.
But it's ultimately the short play time that dooms the game to nothing more than a rental. Only the most hardcore of Superfans should drop the money to purchase this game, because unlike Superman, ""Superman Returns"" can't leap tall buildings in a single bound. It tries, but comes up just short of its goal.
