Superman Returns

Posted June 2, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

About the most well-known superhero in the world is back. First we got a new movie and of course now also a game that goes along with it. With “Superman Returns” being quite the disappointment for many, the expectations for this game waren’t too high either.

Only few amongst us won’t know the story of Superman. A baby that was sent from the dying planet Krypton to Earth in order to give it a future and bring it to safety. Nice, isn’t it?

The people from Krypton have special powers but due to the fact that the planet is filled with crystals that eliminate these powers, nobody could really use them over there. However, such crystals don’t exist on Earth so Clark Kent can use all his abilities over here, making Superman truly Super.

Clark’s ship landed near the large city Metropolis where the whole saga plays. When you play the game you also get the idea that you’re in a truly huge city as it’s enormous. Compare it with San Andreas but then even bigger. However, this is about the only thing that you can compare to GTA as you can’t use vehicles, run around with guns, … which would be kinda stupid seeing that our hero can run and fly faster than any motorised means of transport. Within seconds, Superman can break the sound wall and get to the other side of the city pretty quickly eventhough that still takes a couple of minutes. Of course, this only shows how big the city is.

Being quick isn’t the only power our hero has. Also his eyes are all but normal. They’re perfect to use at the average barbecue with the “Heat Vision” and if the ice has melted, he can easilty freeze it again with his breath. And of course, he’s stronger than anyone we know. Even lifting a fully loaded schoolbus isn’t a problem.

Helping around in casual situations like a barbecue isn’t the only thing you can do with these powers of course. You’ll use them to protect Metropolis from all kinds of dangerous hoodlums and animals. Light them on fire, freeze them, blow them away, give them an uppercut or just throw a car in their face. All nice ways of getting rid of the opposition. Even the large monsters that can trash complete buildings with one stroke can be taken by catapulting all kinds of debree you find.

That’s about the goal of this game, killing people and bosses. Next to that there are also a couple of side-quests and mini-games (like racing) of looking for cats on the rooftops of buildings.

To show the city and the super powers in a more filmic way the game has tons of great sound effects and up to here, Superman Returns is pretty decent. However, the graphics are quite a downer compared to the rest of the game. Probably the devs downgraded the quality here to prevent framedrops in this huge environment and this is somewhat sad although you can say it’s a “functional evil”.

The graphical aspect isn’t the only one where the game doesn’t score all too great though, also the replayability is equal to zero. Superman Returns is the type of game where you get fed up with playing after only a couple of hours. It’s extremely repetitive with always just looking for a couple of bad guys and after getting rid of them taking on a boss. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the entire course of the game. All but original so to say.

At first the game looked very promising thanks to the trailers where we got to see many huge opponents and a city that was even bigger than San Andreas. Unfortunately, the game itself is all but “super”, especially due to the repetitive nature. Recommended? Maybe if you really like Superman, but personally I think you better go look for something else to satisfy your heroic needs. The only cool thing about this game are the super powers and the first minutes of playing with them but once the novelty is gone, there’s little left to have fun with.

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