Superman Returns Review (Xbox 360)
Is Superman's return third time lucky?
Developer: EA Tiburon
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, EA.
Release Date: 24th November 2006 (UK), 20th November (NA)
Platforms: Xbox 360, Xbox, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, GameBoy Advance.
Part the third of the Summer of Superman.
Infogrames’ previous efforts with Shadow of Apokolips and The Man of Steel were rather mixed, with some good bits to it but its limited budgets weighed it down. What they should have done was focused on one single game, not two and release them within a few months of each other. Inevitably with the release of the Superman Returns film in June 2006 meant there was going to be a video game tie-in, as was the style at the time. Infogrames no longer had the license to the property so it was EA’s turn to take a stab at it, and not their only film tie-in game that year either. Tiburon was mostly known for making NFL, NASCAR, and the odd military chopper games so for them to tackle the Man of Steel was quite the sharp turn for the developers. This time should be better, right? I mean, they’ve got EA money now. They’ve got a bigger budget to play with!
The game uses the film’s plot as its outline structure, and loosely at that, and was written by comic book veteran Marv Wolfman and Saturday morning cartoon and video game writer veteran Flint Dille. It follows thusly; Superman has returned to Earth after searching the remains of Krypton. Upon his return to Earth he clashes with Mongul on Warworld after his ship gets abducted by the warmonger. Superman fights his way out then makes his way home. Lex Luthor, meanwhile, invades Superman’s Fortress of Solitude taking some Kryptonian crystals, combining them with kryptonite and creating a kryptonite island much like he does in the film. It’s all told through cutscenes as in-game you don’t see Luthor, Lois, Jimmy, Perry, or Kitty at all. All the cutscenes revolve around Superman, Lois, Luthor, and Kitty as well as extra characters they threw into this such as Mongul, Mxyzptlk (pronounced mix-is-pit-lick), Bizarro, and Metallo as they cause problems for Superman, of course. They also exclude Richard and little Jason from the plot entirely. Lois still gets a lift to Kryptonite Island but with an indiscriminate pilot taking her there and rescuing Superman from the sea. It pretty much ends the same way as the film too where Superman launches the island into space only he doesn’t die this time around. And they have Superman fend off tornadoes from destroying Metropolis because of the ecological changes of the island being made which I’ll further elaborate on later. Luthor’s fate is also left ambiguous as he flies off in a chopper with Kitty so who knows where they go? I mean, in the film they get stranded on a tiny island.
As far as video game tie-in plots for films go it’s alright. It sticks to the plot of the film and adds a lot more for the game’s sake around it including some wild stuff from the comics.
Superman Returns controls pretty alright and it has corrected some issues I had from the previous games. You can pick up and throw pretty much everything and anything from enemies to the Daily Planet globe and not have to deal with lofty controls while hovering and carrying items either. There are combos now and varied use of your powers within them. You can level up and gain stronger powers allowing you to charge your eye blasts for a devastating wide area assault or freeze breath where you can freeze everything in sight or even make your own tornadoes with your super breath blowing everything away. You also unlock more combos as you level up, some with some very nice flourishes such as dodging around an enemy with RB then hitting X for a surrpise blow and the thousand fists combo where you rapidly press X then Y then rapidly press X again, although it didn’t always register for me. Which a lot of the combos don’t always work sadly. But they’re there! And when they do work it does make combat quite fun. At first at least because eventually it becomes rather repetitious.
Holding Y you can launch up into the air, or tapping Y you can lightly lift off, and holding Y in the air you can plummet down to the ground below or tapping Y lightly drop back down again. The flying is one of this game’s strongest qualities however. You have all of Metropolis to explore and you can fly everywhere at your whim. At high speeds you can’t turn tightly, which becomes troublesome later with Mxyzptlk races, but maneuverability is good enough anyway. Holding RB you can sprint on the ground but in air you soar off like a speeding bullet and breaking the sound barrier. Unfortunately it’s just an illusion of speed. You do fly pretty damn fast but those booms and speed lines are just flair making you feel like you’re going faster than you actually are, which is a shame. Still, you have proper camera control while flying this time! You can hover and use the right stick to look around and left stick to hover and strafe around and pull in and out. If you want to ascend and descend you hold RB while still and pushing up or down on the left thumbstick raising or lowering you. Much better control this time, although ascending and descending as such is kind of slow. And at times it does get a little awkward and janky to control. As such, while Superman does control better than he has ever been before, it is still quite rough around the edges if you’re looking for precision.
As for what you do as Superman, it’s a little like before where you pummel bad guys and each has weaknesses to your powers; fiery meteors you blast with your ice breath and icy meteors you blast with your heat vision, as you’re taught right away defending Metropolis from a meteor shower. But it does copy sins of the past as some enemies are resistant to certain powers and weak to others. For example flamethrowing Metallo bots are weak to ice breath and immune to heat vision while the rest of the scrapheap can be more immune to heat vision blasts and ice breath. There are clone dragons, ones who spew ice and ones who spew fire. I’ll let you figure out which dragons are weak and immune to which of Supes’ powers.
And for the most part that’s all you do to protect Metropolis, just beat up bad guys. You do put out building fires on the odd occassion and in the last mission directly save citizens carrying them to somewhere safe, and at the end of a brawl you can bring hurt citizens to nearby ambulances, but it’s more action oriented than actually saving people. Sure, there’s a wide variety of enemies to defeat from Metallo bots, dragon clones, Warworld bounty hunters, gargoyle mutants, and assault drones, and bosses with Metallo, Mongul, and even Riot of which you face multiple times each, but it falls into the same pitfalls of the previous games. Because of that it makes combat and gameplay rather repetitive and quick to become boring. Oh, you’ve beaten Metallo and now you’ve got clones to defeat? It’s all got the same strategy anyway on how you beat them. You might be able to experiment a little with your powers on how to dispatch them, like blowing them all away with your super breath on the ground but it’ll just litter them everywhere and you soon resort to the same strategy of freeze them and pummel them or blast them with your heat vision. An effort was made, but not enough to differentiate it from past mistakes. I really wanted a variety of ways to help save citizens. I wanted to put out more fires, save citizens from a traffic accident, stop bank heists, rush an injured person to the nearest hospital like you can in Spider-Man 2. Anything to make gameplay more varied and different things for you to do as Superman saving Metropolis from the grand to the mundane. There’s also no use of x-ray vision at all here so there’s nothing in the way of solving puzzles anywhere in this game. They could’ve used that for hide and seek missions.
Because of Superman’s nigh invincibilty, he doesn’t have a health bar but rather the city of Metropolis does. This has always been divisive amongst players but I agree with it. It makes sense and I argue it works because Superman has always been about protecting Metropolis. The city and its people has always come first to him. Yes, Superman absolutely can take bumps and fail in this, and he does have an energy meter where if you exude too much power and take a hit you become stunned and weakened for a moment. Even facing Metallo as he radiates kryptonite your power bar becomes weakened and so you have to resort to another method to defeat him. But for the city to have a health bar over Superman it shows where your prioity is, what your main goal of the game is and that is protecting Metropolis. With you being Superman it’s highlighting what your responsibilities are. It gets damaged the more enemies run amok destroying everything, so it’s up to you to stop them as quickly as possible. Saving citizens after a battle will restore the city’s health and to give you incentive to explore every nook and cranny of your home there are 100 kittens to save. It’s bizarre, but it’s a Superman classic, and for each kitten you save the more the city’s total health increases.
There are some improvements this game has over the previous ones, like there are no timed missions! The only real rush to get something done is preventing the city’s health from lowering any further, but other than that there are no missions where you’re on a tight time limit. With the inclusion of Mxyzptlk and Bizarro they provide some nice side missions. Mxyzptlk offers ring races around the city and they’re mostly doable. Your only contention is getting a grapple on the flying around tight corners to beat the time limit but they’re eventually winnable. “Wait! You said there weren’t any time limit missions!” And there aren’t! These are races, they’re totally different. Plus, at least it fixed the ring race errors of Superman 64. But anyway, with Bizarro you’re given destruction missions where you play as Bizarro and you have to save (and by that I mean destroy) as much of Metropolis as you can within a set time and point limit —”Time limit!”—Shh! These are fun in concept, but also become rather repetitive too. There’s no variety in how you smash things up to score big points enough but walk down a road littered with cars, hold X to do a spin attack and destroy all the cars around you with a Bizarro attack bonus. I tried blasting everything with heat vision at first but found it doesn’t rack up enough points. Periodically Metallo turns up early on and you have to clobber him a few times before he turns into a giant mechanic kaiju and Mongul follows Superman to Earth for revenge bringing with him his hunters and Overcast. What an asshole.
The boss fights, sadly, aren’t anything spectacular to tout about. There’s some neat ideas and having mostly better combat to engage in battle with the likes of Mongul, Bizarro, and Riot, but there isn’t a satisfying structure around them. Metallo and Outcast when they become giant all you do is hurl cars and whatever else at them until they fall. Mongul and Bizarro you dodge around and pummel, and the final boss of the game is a tornado… which I’ll get to in a moment. The only unique repeating boss fight I think there is in the game is Riot. When you hit him he duplicates himself. To provent him from breaking off multiples, you freeze him and clobber him. If you don’t contain him well enough with your ice breath he’ll run rampant around Metropolis.
Superman Returns generally looks good. Superman looks like Brandon Routh from the film and nicely you can unlock two additional outfits; the silver pod suit you use at the beginning when on Warworld which you later unlock after beating Bizarro, and the golden age suit when you beat the game with his classic S shield. It’s a whole new model as well with a different head scuplt and the colours stand out more vibrantly than the standard film suit. The false sense of speed that flying gives you with the push of the speed lines and wind blowing around you is pretty great. Cape physics even work alright, even if when doing the thousand fists combo the cape tends to stretch like it’s made of unstable molecules, but it looks more amusing than something to grumble at. In some areas you see birds flying around with you, which is a nice touch, and Warworld’s arena looks sci-fi enough. The enemies do look dinstinguisable enough and I think Bizarro and Mxyzptlk are my favourite looks, even if Mxyzptlk is hard to take notice of in the races and he’s completely inanimate at the start of the race. Metropolis doesn’t look as grand as it should though. In fact it looks weird being this giant tiered island nestled in a dammed canyon. There’s none too many distinguishable landmarks in the city, for as giant as it is, save for the Daily Planet building and a park with a golden statue of Superman. When you’re on the ground there’s not a lot going on at all either. For a city with over 9000 buildings you’d think there’d be some creative variety in this place but no. The more you look at it the more it becomes a logistical confusing nightmare as well. Like how does anyone realistically get around? I know it’s fantasy but each section is literally walled off from other parts of the city and these giant concrete walls look hideously industrial. There’s highways connecting certain parts of the city but they don’t go to anywhere else. There’s blimps you have to save from dragons in a mission, so ideally some people would get around with blimps, right? But you don’t see any flying around at all outside of that one mission. It just don’t add up! In effect it kinda makes you not care about this place because there’s no personality or anything going on for you to want to care about this city other than being obligated to because you’re Superman.
The music is better and sounds less generic than previous efforts. It actually tries sounding heroic but again there’s no obvious Superman theme being played here. There was also effort put into the sound effects to make things sound that much more impactful. There’s heavy wooshes as you swing your fists and a weight behind the impacts, the heat vision sizzles, the ice breath twinkles as it freezes everything, and there’s a tremendous gust behind your super breath. The sound of your cape rippling as you’re speeding away flying and the explosion as you break the sound barrier is all very good.
The voice acting ain’t too terrible either. Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, Parker Posey, and Kevin Spacey try not to phone it in. Spacey even has fun doing an alteration on his bellowing “WRONG!” when he confronts Lois mocking her that Superman will come save her. Bosworth does pretty good explaining exposition and trying to incite intrigue and Routh does quite well. Posey doesn’t have too much to say or do in the cutscenes but she tries. Bizarro is goofy in the best way and Mxyzptlk is overdramatically fun. The rest of the supporting voices are not good. There’s only one line from Emil Hamilton at the beginning in the tutorial meteor shower mission and in the blandest most perfunctory way he goes “Superman… weneedyourhelp.” No urgency, no effort just “Eh, lemme get this done in one take. I got an appointment to get to in like 5 minutes.” It’s awful. Also a waste of the character. It would’ve been interesting to see Emil properly and interact with STAR Labs like we could in SoA. Ah well, another time perhaps.
And so, you’ve brought down Metallo, you’ve booted Mongul and his gang up the butt and sent them packing back to Warworld, you’ve stopped Bizarro from “saving” Metropolis, you’ve raced all of Myxzptlk’s trials, you’ve frozen Riot, you’ve destroyed all of the clones, saved some blimps, put out fires, and rescused all 100 kittens. And what do you get to wrap it all up? Stopping a tornado. No final battle against Metallo, no Brainiac, no Darkseid, and certainly no Lex Luthor as he’s ideally the main villain of this game. But how would a final fight against Luthor go in this game? He never suits up, he never gets his hands dirty unless he brings whoever or whatever down to his level. A boss fight against this Luthor would’ve been even more pathetic for a video game than a tornado. Naturally, the final boss proved unfavourably but I say it could’ve been far worse and it’s fine. Remember, your responsibilities as Superman is to save Metropolis, not just from bad guys but from disaster too. Luthor is creating a kryptonite island and in so doing has ecological repercussions. So of course nature will throw a fit and destroy this anomoly and it’s up to you to stop this tornado from tearing through Metropolis and destroying it. It’s subversive for a boss fight, but it’s also the most Superman thing to do. It gives you a challenge by using all of your powers to quell the raging tempest, and it does feel perilous as you’re trying to keep people from harm. Two people, sure, but people nonetheless. But so you stop the tornado by hitting opposites of heat and ice and then it dissipates. It cuts to a final cutscene where Superman confronts Luthor, gets beaten to a pulp and knocked into the ocean, fished out by Lois, then uproots the island as Luthor and Kitty flee, hurls the rock into space then crashes back down into the water with Lois wrapping things up while a montage of what you’ve done plays, framed as an article answering the question “Does the world still need Superman? Yes.”
This is, sadly, another very mixed result with Superman. It had fixed some problems of the past but repeated other mistakes making for repetitive and boring gameplay and not living up to Superman’s potential with his powers and abilities. It also comes with problems of its own. As with all film tie-in games they’re rushed and don’t have enough time to iron out any issues, flesh out gameplay, and polish. There’s one annoying bug where with collecting the kittens they won’t register collection of one. I went through and followed a video guide on the location of every kitten twice over and one I had found early on didn’t register. I don’t know if collecting the first one outside the Daily Planet triggers off the introductory cutscene with Mxyzptlk or if his cutscene happens another way, but I’m sure that cutscene bugged out the cat I first collected and didn’t register. So that meant I’ll never 100% this game save unless I start a whole new game. And at this point I don’t really want to because it’ll feel like a chore doing all the races and Bizarro missions and main missions all over again. I could use cheats to make it easier, there are cheats such as all powers and city invincibility and unlock everything, but it won’t feel so satisfying to pull off.
This feels like two steps forwards, one step back in developing the perfect Superman game. Each game has felt closer and closer to getting it right but they’ve not been able to achieve it due to time and budget. It learned from some past mistakes but didn’t learn from others. Even in being faithful to Superman as a character protecting Metropolis it alienated other players from its subvertive and disappointing final boss, even if I’m ok with it. Excecution is a little sloppy but I understand it. Bizarrely this might still be the best Superman game out there, but only just and even then it’s not the best because of it’s underdeveloped execution of ideas and gameplay.
But this, along with SoA and MoS, can be used for future developers as the perfect examples to learn from. Take them as lessons on what to do and what not to do. Dissect what has worked with them and what hasn’t worked, identify their faults and flaws and where the bugs arose. See how you could better pace the game, how to fully utilise Superman’s powers in fun and varied ways for use with combat, puzzles and exploration, and creating as varied enemies with titilating combat that makes gameplay fun and rewarding. Each game has hit something right but they’ve also hit the same negatives each time.
Overall, I think this is worth a play still. It’s entertaining enough and it’ll keep Superman fans happy enough. But take the best of this, SoA and MoS and with a sprinkling of the Arkham Asylum trilogy and you have yourself the perfect Superman game right there. There’s hope for such a game to exist yet.
Where to Purchase:
eBay: £7.45 - £103 / $4- $400
Amazon: £15- £60 / $12 - $40
Cex: £4-£10