The first thing you'll notice is that there's little to do. The first hour you'll have some hope for improvement but little later you'll find that there's nothing else to do than battle a bit with some opponents like robots, classic Superman enemies (Metallo, Bizarro, Lex Luthor) or other vermin. Ok, you do have to break down something at times, put out a fire, get something done within a certain timeframe or rescue a cat, but who is waiting for that?

The only point of light at the end of this tunnel is that the skyline of Metropolis is very impressively shown on your screen, at least in the PS2 version, and that you can fly around as Superman, and go faster than a speeding bullet. A breathtaking view is yours when you go a few miles higher than the tallest building but when you then realise that the only thing to do next is to save a cat you'll quickly fall back into a depression. Don't expect a supernatural version of games like Just Cause or GTA.

I'll quickly sum up why the action is bad: no tactical depth, uninteresting super powers, a flawed hit-detection, a weak lock-on system, you can't jump, and to finish: the camera isn't a hero either and he believes that you have X-ray vision yourself to see through objects. The boss-fights are even worse by the way!

In the DS-version you get some sort of boardgame-like overview of Metropolis, divided into squares where all sorts of things happen. During each turn you can move a couple of these squares, choose to save a part of the city or start fighting a bad guy. If you win the fight the health of the city gets restored a bit. Also here the controls fail, the missions were badly designed, and the whole gives a cheap and clumsy feeling while the combat remains all but interesting.

Graphically you shouldn't expect wonders from the PS2 version. In exchange for a relatively large environment in the form of Metropolis you'll have to live with a disturbing frame-rate, ugly textures, little variation in objects, and of course tons of pop-in's. Only the good music and the decent voices save the presentation a bit from a very negative report. The DS makes it even worse and not only has squary, blurry and boring surroundings, models and effects, but also the music and sound effects will make you cry.