Superman: The Man of Steel Review (Xbox)
Sometimes getting two cakes at once isn't always the best. But this can be a great lesson for developers today on how to make a good Superman game because this was close.
Developer: Circus Freak
Publisher: Atari/ Infogrames
Platform: Xbox
Release Dates: 12th November 2002 (US), 13th December 2002 (EU)
In the final few months of 2002 we saw two Superman games dropping within months of each other. Superman: Shadow of Apokolips for the PS2 (and later Gamecube) based on the animated series and Superman: The Man of Steel for the Xbox following more from the comics. Typically this would be very exciting. Two Superman games at once? But unfortunately with Atari/Infogrames spreading themselves too thin with the IP and being overly ambitious it’s resulted in two sadly underwhelming games. There is some good to The Man of Steel, much like SoA, but I firmly believe if you had smushed these two games together you would’ve gotten a perfect Superman game then. Instead, well…
The plot of the game sees Metropolis looking much more technologically advanced than usual, thanks in part to Lex Luthor having struck a deal with Brainiac 13 the last time he tried to take over with Lex using Brainiac tech to advance the city. However, it’s made it all too easy for Brainiac 13 to come back with a vengeance to take over the city and then the world. So it’s up to our Big Blue Boy Scout to save the day, but it’s not so easy as the last time Superman fared against Brainiac he was nearly beat. Thankfully he has help from Steel and, bizarrely, Luthor.
With Metropolis descending into chaos, Bizarro breaks free from his cryogenic prison along with his clones (how does he have clones? No idea. It’s never explained.) After stopping Bizarro’s bizarre attempts of “saving” Metropolis by setting ablaze fuel tanks and bidding him hello and waking him up (and by that I mean saying goodbye and going night-nights), Steel learns they need a disruptor to prevent Brainiac’s return and reformation of his body. The only place to attain tech powerful enough to do such a thing lies in Warworld, home of Mongul. While Steel holds down the fort, Superman soars off to Warworld, frees some prisoners, attains the disruptor, then has a brief tussle with Mongul in space stopping his ship from fleeing after he threatens to destroy Earth. Things only go from bad to worse when Superman returns home, however, as Lois is kidnapped by Metallo who wants to play King Kong with her, and Steel becomes controled by B13’s nanobots turning him onto the Man of Steel. But knocking Metallo on his ass and Steel back to his senses, Steel finds they need something more as the disruptor isn’t quite enough. Superman suggests they need some Kryptonian tech to give it an extra kick, but the only place to find some lies within the Phantom Zone. Superman and Steel then traverse the Phantom Zone where Superman gets into a fight with the imprisoned Cyborg Superman, and with the Kryptonian tech in hand they bolt after Cyborg Superman’s defeat. Luthor, meanwhile, playing at being a good boy and helping Superman warns there’s a satellite in orbit of B13’s that will destroy the planet below. So Superman goes off into orbit to investigate the satellite, destroy it from within and return back to Earth where— surprise, surprise! Luthor was double crossing Supes all along to use Brainiac 13 to help take over the world. With Brainiac 13 now reformed, Superman uses the Kryptonian disruptor on Brainiac 13 utterly defeating him and saving the day. With Luthor taking all of the credit, naturally, and using this opportunity to bolster his own image. But it’s fine, we all know Superman saved the day as he soars off through Metropolis vowing to keep it protected.
It’s a fine plot. I like Brainiac, Bizarro, Mongul, and Metallo and it was great getting to see them, even Cyborg Superman in the Phantom Zone. It’s very much like the 40’s-70’s era of Superman comics full of cheese as evident in the dialogue as he cries “Great Krypton!” and “Great Scott!” Even Clark and Lois’ banter. But unfortunately nothing truly spectacular ever happens. It’s all servicable to push the game along to the next threat and the next boss fight. I appreciate it giving you multiple locations to visit and even giving you more boss fights than even SoA, but the gameplay itself doesn’t live up to the potential, nor does its restricted budget allow itself to meet it as the quality of it all feels cheap. I complained previously how SoA’s budget restricted it from having a higher quality and this game suffers the same fate. They should’ve put the whole budget of both games into one.
How it plays is incredible mixed. You fly with R trigger, lock on with L trigger, A for light attacks, X for heavy, Y for ice breath, B for heat vision, black button for telescopic vision to zoom onto your objective location, and white for x-ray vision. The layout is rather similar to SoA but with only one button to lock on and the speed dodge traded for an additional attack button, which I majoratively used the heavy attack more often against enemies than the light. I guess they still wanted to try to keep some variety in combat, but it makes one button basically useless. If they implemented combos between light and heavy attacks and juggled in your powers that would’ve added more flourish and fun to the combat as you already use a mix of melee with powers anyway. For example, there are basically 3 enemy types, one weak to ice breath, one weak to heat vision, and one to melee. Freeze the greens, shoot the purples, and smack the yellows, though freeze the yellows first so you can actually get a hit on them as locking on doesn’t always work in your favour and there are some depth perception issues with hovering. You can try locking onto an enemy that’s right in front of you but if it’s a few meters below or above you, even if in your sight, it won’t recognise the target, and then if you think you’re in place to land a punch you realise you’re a few feet away. This becomes an annoyance, especially if you’re on a time limit.
That said, at least there is some enemy variety. You get small and big Brainiac bots with the bigger and tougher ones coming out near the end of the game, Bizarro clones, Warworld guards, rogue Steelworks robots, and Phantom Zone criminals, as well as varying turrets and beacons that continuously spawn enemies unless you destroy those first. Despite that, there’s no equal variety in its gameplay. It doesn’t matter what enemy you’re facing you’re still going to follow the same strategy: destroy the spawning beacon, eye blast the purple enemies, freeze the green enemies, and wallop the yellow ones and spam eye blasts on the turrets and additional B13’s. Because of that it quickly becomes stale and boring and the enemies themselves become indistinguishable. “Oh, new enemy type! Eh, doesn’t matter. They all behave the same.”
Flying is otherwise ok. It’s maneuverable enough and you can collide into walls if you’re not careful which isn’t too punishing, just nice enough to realise there’s some tangibility within your environment, but you also don’t move fast enough as you can often find yourself bombarded by enemy fire and not able to escape it. Like SoA, there’s no camera control as the right stick is delegated to flight controls, with up and down raising and lowering you and left and right strafing side to side. Annoyingly, as you’re hovering, left and right on the left thumb stick is rotational strafing, which should’ve been on the right thumbstick for better control. Because of this it makes controls iffy and you find yourself trying to hover around with what’s basically flipped controls and sadly there’s no way of changing this in the settings. There’s numerous control options available focusing more on melee or ranged or arcade gameplay styles, but nothing for changing the flight controls around. Stupid.
There are 25 missions in total, more than SoA, and they all range from defeating enemies, picking up items and putting them elsewhere, an escort mission, protecting buildings, proteceting civilians, defusing bombs, putting out fires, and boss fights. I admire it trying to give you different things to do and using all of your powers. Unfortunately they’re so poorly paced with levels overly stuffed with things to do, with no checkpoints, and going on and on it just becomes a bothersome, tedious bore. After numerous failures on a mission, you soon learn the pattern of things and it becomes mind numbing to do. For example there’s a mission where you have to stop a rail whale (a train) from crashing by removing hovercars on the tracks, putting out fires, and defeating B13’s in the area. However you don’t have to wait around if you know well enough by this point what happens where and you can just zip to where you need to go. You don’t even have to defeat all of the robots as, one, it’ll just waste you time, and two, it’ll still have enough health by the end of the level if you’ve been quick to dispose of other essential robots, remove hovercars blocking the way, and put out fires on the track.
And speaking of removing hovercars off train tracks, you’re often grabbing and placing towers in another location, or rescuing a citizen from the top of a burning building. But for some very silly reason when you grab a hold of something heavy like cars or towers, the controls become ridiculously floaty and slidey. So when you’re on a timer trying to put a tower in its place it makes it annoyingly difficult. You can’t stop yourself from sliding away from your target, let alone get yourself into position easily enough. It’s like moving a puck on an air hockey table with a pint of beer on top and not spilling a drop. At least when you pick up a civillian it controls fine and you don’t float off, but why couldn’t it control like that for heavier stuff? Is it to add extra weight and stress to how heavy the items are to handle? That makes no sense. Superman can lift this stuff with ease. That’s adding needless difficulty where there needn’t be any. Still, at least when you’re in range to place the item, the lock-on target changes orange and it snaps you into place to drop it when you press L.
There’s also the mission where you infiltrate Brainiac 13’s satellite to blow it up by disabling its nuclear missiles from going off. It’s great that there’s a more enclosed area for a level as all levels take place in the open but its execution makes it frustrating because of one fatal flaw. To disable the missiles you have to destroy one of two computers and you use your x-ray vision to locate the correct one. While I’m happy it used x-ray vision more than once for missions in this, here it was useless as there was no discernable detail on which console to destroy. It says to destroy the one that has B13 energy flowing through it, but there’s no lines around it indicating such power and both look identical as well. So how are you supposed to find which is which? Dumb luck and trial and error. It was such a frustrating waste of potential there. And what’s worse is you have to pick one of two computers multiple times— 6 times if I’m remembering correctly.
The boss fights are underwhelming. Bizarro you just wail on in between putting out fires he starts and spitting fire at you. Mongul you don’t even see in game outside of cutscenes and you just have to bombard his ship with eye lasers stopping him from escaping while dealing with guards he spawns. Metallo is the worst in which you have to save people ahead of his rampage and then just hover above him and throw punches at him. He never even touches you, not once. He tries, but nothing. Steel has some strategy as he supposedly taunts before he swings his hammer around at you and you’re supposed to avoid that or lose a hefty chunk of health, but just wail on him with your fists all the same and eventually he falls too. Cyborg Superman is ridiculous as he bombards you with gunfire in varying patterns and all you do is hover around dodging his blasts and spam your heat vision at him until he falls. And it’s on a timer too as you’re supposed to get the hell out of the Phantom Zone as soon as possible. And then there’s the final fight against Brainiac 13. You fight off enemies, place 4 towers in different spots to discharge B13’s shields, freeze his chest plate, and spam heat vision blasts at his head. Rinse and repeat until he’s done. But this final fight became so silly as you’re suddenly massively overwhelmed by B13 bots nearer the end that you fall before Brainiac does, and right as you’re about to defeat him too. There’s nothing in the way of picking up health in the game either, so it’s just bare through it. You don’t get a meter for your powers at least, so you’re free to abuse them as you will, but to get any health back you have to finish a set task before moving onto the next objective. Still, I wasn’t about to put up with this ridiculousness so I used a cheat for infinite health. I’m right at the end so why not? And yes there’s cheats for this too; infinite health, unlock everything, golden superman, render in freeze, and render in x-ray. I have no clue what the last two are, and I found unlocking everything pointless to cheat for as playing through you unlock everything anyway.
You do get some very nice bonuses unlocked with concept art, model viewer, music (if you really love stock superhero music), costume selection of which there are 9, one unlocked after completing an area, cinematic viewer and free roam picking out one of 9 areas to roam around. I found playing through to unlock the costumes makes for a nice incentive to keep playing. Unless you use those cheats, of course. You get your standard Supes outfit, his golden age original look, silver age red and blue costumes, The Return of Superman black outfit, Superman of the 90’s where he sports the same mullet from the black suit, Kryptonian, Post “Our Worlds at War” Mourning outfit (which I have no idea about), and Kingdom Come. Some of the skins aren’t just simple recolours either as the golden age original outfit has a completley different head sculpt. I do greatly appreciate being rewarded with these costumes, especially the Kingdom Come outfit at the very end. It almost gives added incentive to replay the game again using these different skins because they all look great. The concept art gallery is fantastic as the art is so well done, even with Ed McGuinness doing art for Bizaaro. The model viewer is pretty interesting to look at too, seeing how each looks individualistically with 40 to view. There’s 16 tracks to listen to in the music selection and 33 clips to watch in the movie viewer. Unfortunately for free roam, there’s nothing to do in the levels at all apart from fly and there’s no one around, but… yaay, free roam? It’s a lot more than what we got for SoA so I can’t gripe with the rewards at all, apart from if in free roam mode we were able to save civilians every so often and stop some bad guy.
And of this game’s look, the loading screen art is by Ed McGuiness, which adds to that comic book authenticity and where it’s drawing from, but then you get into the game and it looks odd as the rest of the game doesn’t look like that or match it. Superman himself does look great at least. Luthor looks like Luthor, Mongul looks good as does Steel. Metallo looks monstrous, Bizarro looks terrible (and by that I mean great) and is probably my most hated of the bosses looks (most favourite), and Brainiac 13 looks strange. McGuinness’ art almost makes him look like a toy and in game, as giant as he is… yeah, he does look moreso like a toy. For your main big bad you want him to look better.
In fact, you want the whole game to look better. At a first glance with Metropolis looking much more hyper futuristic using Brainiac tech to advance itself it doesn’t look like Metropolis at all, and honestly it looks kinda hideous. But the more I looked at it the more I understood it. Looking at the concept art and models by themselves they look good, and looking around the place in free roam you see Daily Planet’s rooftop globe now a hologram. There’s nuggets of good designs there, they have the right ingredients. Warworld looks dirty in a good way and the space levels are quite beatiful with lense flare from the suns, and the Phantom Zone looks otherworldly and mysterious. But then once you see it all put it together it all looks like an ugly slop. The recipe is all wrong. The city doesn’t look bright, the colours don’t pop, there’s no bold art design about how it looks. The levels are barren and ugly with nothing interesting going on. SoA had the show’s vividity to draw from so that all looked vibrant and fantastic. This doesn’t have anything going for it. The Man of steel is drawing from the comics, yes? So why not draw directly from them? Make the game look like Ed McGuinness’ art even, you already had him on staff, then it’d look like you’re really playing a comic. Wonderful. Perhaps they tried to do a bold comic book look, but they really failed. I’m gonna put the blame solely on budgetary restraints again, however. Their ambition to do two kinds of Superman games only caused them problems they couldn’t afford to rectify. Nice trail behind Supes when he flies at least. That’s one other good thing I can think of to say about it.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the cutscenes tend to have framerate issues too. When Superman and Steel enter the Phantom Zone and in the final cutscene as the B13’s are wiped away, those scenes for me chugged with their framerates. I’m the last person to be a snob and give a damn about framerates, but whether this was because of my disc or not it was clearly an issue with the game.
The music is terrible in this game. It’s so generically stock heroic, it’s worse than SoA had. There’s no Superman theme going on at all. It’s cheap and it’s tacky and it’s not worth the abuse on your ears. As is the dialogue. I get it was following the cheesiness of the early comics, and I don’t mind that at all, but the delivery is so poor. Superman sounds like the most generic, square-jawed superhero ever, Luthor sounds like the most pathetically cunning villain ever, and Brainiac 13 sounds utterly terrible and the dumbest robot ever. I get he’s supposed to sound cold and mechanical, but he sounds so flat, dead and utterly robotic in the worst sense. There’s nothing villainous or chilling about him. It’s like he didn’t even try. Like they just grabbed one of the guys in the office who was so bored out of his skull and the voice director thought “Hey, you’ll do!” Corey Burton he his not. Instead of some nice mozzarella or edam cheese, you get sat-in-a-broken-fridge-for-a-month-in-the-middle-of-a-summer-heatwave cheddar that’s gone moldy and sweaty and smells absolutely rotten kinda cheese with this game. Terrible work by the cast and director. What a waste.
The sound effects aren’t significant either. The most stock wooshing and wind whistling when you’re flying, no impactful sound behind your punches, a barely chilling ice breath sound, nothing devastating for your heat vision, nothing imposing from the enemies, no creative explosive propulson from the enemy gunfire. The soundscape is so mundanely designed it’s like no effort was put into it. There’s nothing going on in the main menu either for music. Can I blame time and budgetary restraints again? Ooh, don’t mind if i do.
I also found there was a few audio issues where the in-game dialogue and sound effects are comparatively quieter than the cutscenes, even with the volume up to max on the settings. Because of this, even though there’s subtitles, it becomes tricky to hear what you’re meant to do— and even the subtitles become a jumbled scrolling mess. The cutscene audio is also poorly mixed where the music can drown out the dialogue. Poor sound design, poor mixing, poor performances and it’s not worth paying attention to the cutscenes, which are also animated extremely hit and miss. Clark at the beginning runs ridiculously when he goes to change into Supes, Metallo stealing off Lois has poor audio placements with footsteps, and Mongul only appears via hologram. Such a shame.
There is a lot wrong with this game. A lot. But there is potential for good there. The plot of the game with Brainiac being the big bad is good, the controls aren’t entirely terrible and only needed some adjustments, there’s variety there with enemies and things to do, there’s a good cast of characters, there’s great rewards to unlock, and it took a lot from the comics. But the execution and lack of a substantial budget massively restricted Circus Freak to meet its ambitious ideas. As lovely as it was to get two Superman games at once in the space of a few months, it was a terrible idea on Infogrames/Atari’s part. Why they did that, I have no idea. What they should have done is combined their efforts and money for one studio to make one single Superman game. Take the good of this game with the good of SoA and you would have had an incredible Superman game with so much to do, fun controls, and lots of locations to visit with lots of bosses to fight.
Unfortunately, this game feels cheap and it misses the mark. You’re met with that evidence right at the start at the main menu with its constrained presentation. It has a lot of promise but it can’t meet it. It tried, I see it did. It tried rewarding you for your time, it tried with some boss battle structure, it tried with a first fully realised open world of Metropolis, it tried drawing from the comics and celebrating it, it tried giving you varied gameplay with enemies and control of Superman, and it tried giving you reason for replayability. But because of Atari/Infogrames’ foolish business decisions, it negatively impacted The Man of Steel (and SoA). Is it worth a play? Sure. Why not. You can easily play much worse games. For Superman fans there’s a few things here to make you happy and for a weekend’s play (it’s only about 3 hours long to fully complete, barely) it’s an amusing time. Quite honestly I see myself returning to this every so often for a guilty pleasurel, and I don’t even believe in guilty pleasures.
Still, from the mistakes made here, this and SoA can be used as an amazing learning opportunity for developers today on how to create the perfect Superman game— as we are so overlong due.
Where to Purchase:
eBay: £8 - £30 / £8 - $550
Amazon: $8- $100
CeX: £12
Screenshots taken from ★WishingTikal★'s playthrough.