So what happens when the movie studios try to revive a classic money-making superhero franchise by throwing as much money as possible at it, getting a great director, and arguing over who should play the lead? You get a 250 (yes that’s a zero on the end) million-dollar movie that is only mediocre at best. To make up some of that cash the studios did the only logical thing and that was make as many products revolving around the said franchise as possible. Everything from lunchboxes to “G-strings” became available this summer featuring the man in blue tights and just recently we finally got the videogame counterpart of the same name. The movie I am talking about is Superman Returns, the latest addition in the long running Clark Kent series from director Bryan Singer (X-Men 2). After seeing the movie, and only being somewhat satisfied, I really didn’t have very high hopes for the videogame version. EA studios delayed the release of Superman Returns: The Videogame, which was supposed to be released at the same time as the movie, almost six months to polish it up and finalize the digital copy. We can only wonder what was actually going on during those six months, as the game in front of us is still a buggy, unfinished, decent action title that could have been so much more. Had a little more work gone into the game it could have turned out to be one of the better “movie to game” products in a genre that is filled with more bad than good.
The storyline of Superman Returns: The Videogame (from now on known as Superman: VG) loosely follows the storyline in the game but actually is more of a hodgepodge that makes little to no sense. Throughout the game you will travel Metropolis while saving innocent humans from the relentless grip of classic “Superman Universe” bad guys, none of which appeared in the movie. You start out by going through a couple tutorials to teach you the ropes of controlling the hero, most of which you could have figured out by yourself as this game only requires the pushing of a few buttons and zero customization. The cut scenes are rendered beautifully but the voice acting quickly kills any relation the game may have to a big budget Hollywood movie. All of the actors sound bland and boring which really hurts the game’s attempt to draw you into the storyline. Super fans of the Superman franchise may get somewhat into the storyline but the average gamer will quickly phase it out and move onto the fun stuff, flying around Metropolis and winning the boss battles.
There are certain things that need to happen in any Superman game for it to make sense in terms of the progression of the storyline. For example even a four year old knows that Superman is actually Clark Kent, do we see Clark Kent even once throughout the game, I think not. Oh and the developers thought it would be too confusing if you were to have to save Lois Lane or fight Lex Luthor even once, that would just be ridiculous right? Wrong, these are the events that fans live for and it would have been nice to play though a couple classic scenarios considering the movie storyline is not followed. We also heard early on that Superman: VG would include bits of story contrived from the past 50 or so years of comic books. Some cool bosses do show up throughout the game but they are so random that it quickly becomes an un-ending chore to figure out how or why they end up in the game at all. As I said before the reason this game is fun at all is the gameplay, not the storyline. While gamers have come to expect little storyline in a button-mashing action game it would have been nice here considering the subject material. All of this senseless storyline adds up to a lackluster amount (less than ten hours) of game time and after it there is little to zero reason to put the disc back in the Xbox 360.
Speaking of gameplay let’s talk about some of the positive features of Superman Returns: VG. Thankfully our hero controls much better than he did in his previous attempts at videogames. Anyone remember Superman 64, sorry I just ran out to bang my head against a brick wall for spending fifty dollars on that paperweight. Anyhow, on to the next-gen version of the speeding bullet and for once he actually flies, fast. The virtual Metropolis is quite large in size thus calling for a mode of transportation, can you imagine Superman jumping in a cab to try and get to that burning building in time? By the grace of Superman’s awkward child neither could EA so they made it easy to jump into the air and fly off to your destination. Each objective is marked by an exclamation point on your mini-map so figuring out where to fly to is a piece of cake. Not only can you fly at normal speed but press down on the shoulder button and you go into “hyper” mode, awesome. Once you get to where you need to be there are a number of ways to go about “saving” the previously mentioned helpless humans. If you have played the demo on Xbox Live than you already know this as it was basically a stripped down (single mission) version of the entire game, but there are three different “attacks” that Superman can pull off. Frozen breath, heat vision, and wind breath are the choices and each one works as you would think it would.
