Superman: Shadow of Apokolips Review (PlayStation 2)
It's the Summer of Superman! Maybe this is the first good Superman game within a history of bad Superman games? Maybe...?
Developer: Infogrames Sheffield House
Publisher: Infogrames/ Atari
Platforms: PlayStation 2, GameCube
Release Date: PS2; 24th September 2002 (US), 15th November 2002 (EU) GC; 26th March 2003 (US), 2nd May 2003 (EU)
I’m not gonna bring up what’s been brought up a thousand times before when it comes to Superman games, it’s been done to death. What I am gonna do, though, is look around for what is a good Superman game to play. Because for the Summer of Superman, as so marketed by DC Comics currently, I’ve been immeasureably excited for the new Superman film so much so that I’ve really been wanting to play some Superman games. Warner Bros. aren’t going to bring one out anytime soon, sadly, so my only option is to look for what already is and has come before.
In 2002 I think we got a little lucky. For the PS2 we got Shadow of Apokolips, which would later be ported over to the GameCube 6 months later, while over on the Xbox we got Superman: The Man of Steel. Both released within a month of each other and no matter what platform you had then as a kid you were gonna get a Superman game. I remember seeing Shadow of Apokolips as a kid in an independent game’s shop— I think it was called Games Planet? Or something like that. But they had a wall of PS2 and Xbox games and I remember vividly seeing the cover art of this game on the wall, alongside Futurama, and The Man of Steel too. They blended in nicely together with the collection of other games on the wall, but I remember being a little fixated on the cover. I recognised the style from the animated show and The Man of Steel looked starker and bolder, they stood out to me. I never got them because I was but a poor child but it always stood out to me in my memories. And so, it wasn’t until recently I got my hands on a copy of this and it’s actually alright. Mostly.
Early impressions were the flying is actually pretty good, it visually looks stunning with its graphics stripped right out from the cartoon and being vividly colourful, it made me smile just flying around the opening Metropolis level getting to grips with the controls. I had a good feeling about it. Then came the succeeding levels and the structure very much reminded me of and felt like Spider-Man on the PS1 and its sequel Enter Electro.
But, so, what’s it about?
Darkseid tasks Kanto with supplying Lex Luthor with Apokoliptian tech to start up Intergang again to destroy Superman. Along the way, Superman thwarts Metallo, Livewire, and Parasite who try to hinder the Man of Steel. Superman knocks Metallo down after a slugfest in the streets and then at Star Labs they remove his head so he’s rendered intert, only for Luthor to later, secretly, reattach his head to cause Superman more problems. You then fight Metallo in Luthor’s office and then immediately again in a car smelting factory type place. Livewire you come across while stopping a prison outbreak keeping her watered down, and Parasite slips free from the chaos in the prison, only he doesn’t get that far while in Metropolis and is swiftly taken down by Superman and sent back to prison.
Metallo serves as the final boss of the game in a rather drawl and slightly underwhelming fight. You blast him with lasers, smack him around and knock him into grinders to massively damage him and then it all suddenly ends. Superman saves the day but Darkseid still looms. The story itself is fine and feels like a good episode of the show, with the show’s cast returning, but it ends unfinished with a lot left unresolved. It feels like episode 1 of a two parter. It’s evident that Darkseid is the big bad of this game but Superman never finds out it’s him, he never goes to Apokolips, he never gets a different variety of enemies past robots so that means no parademons to clobber, and no final boss in Darkseid to defeat. You beat up Metallo, give Luthor a scowl, and then leave it at that because Metropolis is now safe from his meddling for the day.
Because of this, it’s also evident that this game was made on a restricted budget and they only had a limited amount to work with and results in a lot of this game’s downfall. Which is a shame because if they had expanded further and we had gone to Apokolips, it would’ve given a greater variety of missions to do, more going on in the story, and more time with this game as it’s over in 3 hours. Slightly longer than PS1’s Spider-Man, but still underwhelmingly short with not a whole lot going on, and what there is going on it’s brief.
The gameplay is otherwise alright. The flying is one of the more important aspects of Superman and happily it’s pretty good. It’s tight and responsive and in the opening tutorial level the first thing you do is learn to fly. You’re given a minute or so to fly around a small area of Metropolis to get used to the controls before you’re set off to save Metropolis from it citizens in danger and a robber escaping in a helicopter. It’s all quick to put a smile on your face. You hold R2 to fly, and if it’s lightly pressed you fly slowly. Pressing x and square together while flying grants you the speeding bullet ability, soaring as fast as possible to crash forward which becomes very useful against tanks, groups of enemies, and bosses. Sacrificing camera control, you use the right stick to hover up and down.
Combat is very so-so and simplistic with one button (x button) used to attack. Spider-Man at least had combos, here it’s just smash one button, maybe two if you wanna use your powers, which means it quickly becomes repetitive and stale with no real variety between spamming x and shooting lasers by double tapping triangle. Pressing x is also used for a variety of other commands such as interacting with objects and picking them up, which sometimes doesn’t work in its favour. For example, picking up barrels or boxes while hovering, even if you’re right in front of it, Superman won’t always pick it up and hover there twitching, meaning you gotta drop down to pick it up properly. When you do manage to pick something up though, you can grab pipes to use as clubs, or boxes and barrels you can hoist and double tapping x you can throw them forward. Sadly, you often don’t feel as strong as you should be and with the bland combat you can spend about a minute wailing on a tank slowly chipping away at its health and it quickly gets boring. It should take at most 5 hits to squash it, not 50. There is also an ability where you hold x on a stunned enemy to do a super punch but I never got it to work, except on the prison outbreak level where you have to send 4 prisoners back to their cells where after smacking them they’re forcibly stunned so you have to dispose of them correctly.
You do get to use Supes’ other powers. Holding circle you can use your superbreath, only I ever used it maybe 3 times throughout the whole game; once in the tutorial, once in level 2 at the dam, and during Parasite’s boss fight preventing a van from being destroyed and set ablaze. That’s it. Holding L2 to go into first person and pressing circle you can use x-ray vision peeking behind walls for bad guys and civilians to save. This was also useful maybe twice throughout the whole game. Holding triangle you can use heat vision, with a more direct target in first person mode, while double tapping triangle lets you shoot a laser blast which comes in very handy for bosses and enemies. Pressing square and x together while on the ground you can spin rapidly knocking swarming enemies away. Pressing square gives you a dash of speed to dodge out of the way which sometimes is useful but I rarely found a need to use it. Use of all of your powers does drain your power meter, the yellow meter beneath your health meter. It does quickly regenerate, as does your health, but annoyingly it takes forever for your health to regenerate, and there’s no health pickups or anything to restore your meters in the game. Would have been nice if crates or enemies dropped some.
The controls are servicable, and it does feel nice controlling Supes, but it leaves a lot to be desired. The mapping of the controls is also a little strange. I would’ve mapped out the controls differently, as I already said the camera control has been sacrificed on the right analogue stick for flight controls and hovering. The camera will snap around behind you and that’s fine, but there’s no real way to look around the area for what you need to see and that can be troublesome to navigate levels sometimes or locate enemies. You can lock onto enemies with L1 or R1 but I only ever used L1 for locking on, R1 became useless. R1 could’ve been used for speed dashing while square be used for attacks, X for hovering up and L3 for descending. The right stick is used for fancy tricks while flying with R2, and that could’ve been kept as such, but while hovering be allowed to use the right stick to move the camera around.
As for what you can do, there’s 14 missions to do varying from saving and protecting civillians, beating up robots, and boss fights. Saving civillians does feel good to do and you do feel like Superman, so it wins points there, but for whatever reason in most missions there’s time limits. Some are understandable when it’s preventing a self destruct sequence or a dam from bursting, but these time limits are often annoyingly tight creating some artificial difficulty. What doesn’t help its difficulty is the level layout isn’t entirely clear on what to do or where you can go or what needs to be done making for time wasted. You get a camera panning at the beginning of a level, but once you’re in you still need to find your way about the place and that often results in trial and error failing. One mission was quite annoying where you have to beat a bunch of Intergang robots in two waves and then knock the lead robot into a vat of magma, who hangs out there stunned for whatever reason. But if you miss him with speeding bullet and he flies off elsewhere you have to repeat the waves of the same spawning bots again and again until you nail him. Thankfully there are checkpoints, so you don’t have to redo certain tedious parts from the very beginning. There are also a couple of missions that require test of strength where you must mash the X button as fast as you can to push in a block or push back against a wind tunnel. If you have baby thumbs, these can be hard, again making things unfairly difficult.
There is also a stealth mission where you play as Clark infiltrating LexCorp to find the source of where these robots are coming from. It’s a neat idea, but when there’s an odd delay on movement, trying to carefully traverse laser grids makes things hard and you end up being ping-ponged between laser walls and then you die. It makes things harder than they need to be just because you can’t easily get the timing right. Again, thank goodness for checkpoints.
The variety of the missions are either repetitive or one and done, which is a shame because early on it feels promising. There’s only one stealth mission as Clark, there’s only one or two instances where you use your x-ray vision which could’ve been used more often to solve puzzles— which there needed to be puzzles to solve in general— there’s one escort mission in the prison, two or three instances of test your strength, and an overabundance of smashing robots. They have the mechanics there for a vast variety on missions of things you could do and puzzles to solve, but because of those budgetary restrictions I’m gonna keep on blaming, it makes level variety and the things you can do sparse and that’s a real shame. Worse still is there isn’t anything in the way of unlockables or collectibles. Spider-Man had comics to collect on each difficulty and suits to unlock, but for ol’ Supes, nothing. Just go do the mission and move on. You get nothing for your efforts after. Although, you do get character bios, models and concept art to look at and a list of unlocked game videos to rewatch.
You’re only given a small handful of bossfights; Livewire, Parasite and Metallo, and they throw them all at you one after another at the end of the game. There’s a helicopter you stop at the beginning but that doesn’t really count. You slam into it and smack it when it lands on a roof then cart off the goon to prison. The boss battles are otherwise underwhelming. Livewire’s is the only one that actually tries to do something and uses a bit of brainpower where you have to use water against her, using your heat vision to fuse a pillar to drop her into water and then drop a cascade above her completley imobilizing her. Parasite you have to protect a van from damage frequently putting its flames out, but otherwise all you do is wail on him and blast him with eye lasers. Especially the same with Metallo. Just keep whacking and blasting him and eventually he’ll fall. There is some progress where Metallo loses his flesh and runs around and hurls stuff at you later on, but there’s nothing special about the fights sadly.
There are cheats you can input, although oddly there are different cheats for each platform. The PS2 version has its own set of cheats such as easier difficulty, invincibility, infinite power meter, and unlock everything, while the GameCube version additionally has much more cheats including some more beneficial for the difficulty of the game such as removing the time limit. I guess while being ported they had time to add more cheats such as playing as Parasite and a free roam mode, which is a shame the PS2 version doesn’t get that and makes replayability quite limited.
At least the game looks amazing. It looks like it’s stripped straight from the show. It’s perfectly cartoony, the colours are vibrant, every model looks perfect. If anything this game does right it’s the visuals. It’s a delight to look at. They did amazingly with the art style on this game from the characters to the backgrounds. The loading screens too, while taking a good while to load, are fantastic cards to see. Even the menus. Although while very basic and plain, evident of its budget, they did the best they could with the presentation of the menus. There is a patricular film grain on them and the art still looks good. They weren’t working with a lot that was given to them, but the graphics are astounding. Now imagine if they had a bigger budget, hoo boy.
As I said earlier, they got the cast from the show back for that added authenticity to the characters. It would be odd having Lex from the cartoon and not having him voiced by Clancy Brown. Or Superman not voiced by Tim Daly—uhh Justice League not withstanding. That was because of a whole scheduling issue and Daly doing another show at the time. But anyway, everyone’s back. With the exception of Darkseid however. Replacing Michael Ironside from the show is Kevin Michael Richardson, who does do really well with his deep, menacing voice. It isn’t the same as Ironside’s sinister growl, but Richardson always does good and it still sounds like Darkseid here.
The music, meanwhile, sounds like a mimicry of the show constrained by the limited budget making it sound rather cheap and ineffective. It doesn’t use any of the themes from the show at all except for what sounds like generic heroic music. It’s servicable but it isn’t Superman enough. The sound effects are very hit or miss as well. You got the wooshing flying sounds from the show and laser beams of the eyes, but everything else is cheap. There’s no heavy impact blows when you’re wailing on a tank, just pathetic little Pssh! Pssh! And there’s nothing dynamic about anything with the soundscape. No haunting, perilous atmosphere from the robots, no devastating shocks from Livewire, no ominous threat from Parasite or danger from Metallo. Nothing. Just the most barebones sounds possible. But again, I blame the limited budget. And the time given, too. That surely don’t help.
Superman, for some reason or another, has always been really hard to adapt into a video game. Which is baffling considering his abilities. Superman: Shadow of Apokolips is incredibly flawed but is a result of a limited budget, and making do with what they had they did their best. Sadly, it’s really short and one of the shortest games I’ve ever played. Just when you start getting into it and getting used to how it plays, you suddenly get 4 boss fights thrown at you in a row and then it’s all over in a flash. 3 hours and 4 minutes to be exact that it took me at least. No following any leads at LexCorp and going to Apokolips, no fighting Parademons, no fighting Darkseid, nothing. Just saving Metropolis from Metallo, Lex, and keeping Livewire and Parasite in prison and stopping these Apokoliptian robots and Intergang from roaming the city and pushing weapons. The 14 levels you’re given are relatively short and the artificial difficulty with restrictive time limits, limited combat and bloated enemy HP is what pads it out mostly. If you know what you’re doing you’ll fly through these levels with ease, especially if you use the easy mode cheat.
It is buggy in places where you can’t pick up items, or for whatever reason one of the cutscenes is interrupted by an abrupt end. My disc is utterly clean and looks damn near brand new, so I have no idea why it won’t play that cutscene properly and it’s the only one that does it. In the prison outbreak mission, I had to escort prison guards and one guard got stuck walking into the corner of a wall and I couldn’t do anything to get him out of it. I guess maybe fortunately a little later in the level I died and from the checkpoint it corrected him and brought him back up with the others.
It is flawed, very flawed, but bizarrely there are things I do like about it and am happy with it as it has some charm and good to it with its simplistic, old school late 90’s/early 2000’s approach to licensed superhero games ala Spider-Man, even if by the PS2 era it should be more advanced by now. They should’ve put all the budget they had onto one singular Superman game to make something bigger and more refined instead of splitting up and making two Superman games. Quality instead of quantity. In fact, I believe if you smushed this game with Xbox’s Man of Steel then you probably would’ve gotten an even more amazing multiplatform Superman game. That game has you facing Brainiac and going to Warworld and facing Mongul! It has level and enemy variety! It has unlockable costumes! IT HAS FREE ROAM MODE!!! But is also repetitious and has its own faults too.
Alas, restrictions and flaws and all, this was perhaps the first good Superman game, somehow. You could fly well, it looks amazing and it’s playable enough. I think it’s worth a play anyway, you can easily play worse games. It just needed more money and focus and time to really polish it up. And not make a second Superman game alongside it either that was doing something entirely different. Just pick one and focus on that. Maybe one day we’ll get that in a Superman game. Maybe one day. There is still hope afterall…
Where to Purchase:
eBay: £4 - £150 / $6 - $850
CeX: £5- £80