Superman Returns

"Great rental, terrible buy"

I'll start with what's good. I like to start reviews with the good stuff.

I felt the graphics in the 360 version were pretty good. The designers seem to have spent a lot of time making sure the buildings of Metropolis were unique and the windows reflect beautifully. The water looks very realistic and detailed too. The bad guys in the game are also very well drawn. Unfortunately, the detail at street level is not so good but acceptable. Another cool feature of this game is that you can see from one end of Metropolis all the way to the other in fairly good detail.

Another good quality of this game are that Superman's powers are fun. The most enjoyable power is his flying, which enables you to see Metropolis from so many different angles. It's also nice to turn on the super-duper wind breath and blow an entire street's worth of cars 100 feet into the air from time to time.

OK, now for the bad stuff.

The game is very repetitive. After a fairly interesting intro, you are plopped into Metropolis where you start by fighting some robots. After you clean them up, more robots will appear a minute later. Then more robots show up after that, and then some more. There aren't a wide variety of robots to fight either so the action never really varies. About halfway through the game, you'll fight a major boss which would seemingly be an interesting battle from the movie in the demo version, but really just ends up being a car throwing fest. Pick up a car, throw it at him, repeat 30 or so times til he dies (which is odd considering he grew to enormous heights by absorbing cars). After this point, you'll fight a whole new type of monsters. These are mutants. Sometimes they team up with robots so you won't forget how to fight them. This is still very repetitive. I can think of about 12 different enemies you'll fight throughout the game, excluding the bosses. Between these fights, there's not much to do. The only side games are boring races with no rewards and a kitten finding mission, again with no rewards.

The controls are fantastic until you try to combat things. Combat relies on performing combos with the buttons, which is fine, except one of those buttons toggles flying and running. So, if you pull the combo off wrong, you often find yourself launching into the air which makes it difficult to finish off what you were fighting. Fortunately, the game provides a "lock" button so you will face a targetted enemy, but it can be difficult to choose the correct enemy with it at times.

The sound is mediocre at best. Terrible voice-overs and repetitive bashing noises plague the entire game. The music is also not at all inspiring.

Also, the game is very short. I completed it in just 5.5 hours, but I did not finish all the races since they are incredibly easy and provide nothing extra in the game, nor did I find all 100 kittens (I think I found 10). If you are a stickler for completing every last thing in a game, you could easily spend days finding all the kittens since the game has 80 square miles of terrain to explore. The replay value is also very low. I don't see a point in playing through it again. It might be fun to pop the disc in and blow up Metropolis every once in a while, but that's about it.

The game is also not very challenging. Sometimes it will throw a very large amount of robots at you in a single mission, but if you lose, you can reload the game with a fully healed Metropolis and just try again.

Lastly, the game has some fairly cool cut scenes that are based somewhat on the movie, but they have nothing to do with the game at all. So, I didn't really see a point in having them.

Graphics: 8/10
Sound: 6/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Fun: 6/10
Challenge: 4/10
Overall: 6/10

If you're a Superman fan, this makes a great rental. You can finish it off in a day or two and take it back to the store. I'd definitely stay away from buying it. 60 bucks is too pricy for this one.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/06