Superman Returns: The Videogame

Electronic Arts

Stars: 2 out of 5

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … a quickly fading novelty. Even flying becomes boring when playing Superman Returns: The Videogame. The game is tedious, repetitive and aggravating. While Superman’s powers are initially a lot of fun, they don’t stay that way for long.

The game takes place in Metropolis, which is now an island for some reason. It touts that players can fly around the entire city from the start-possibly a crack against the Grand Theft Auto series’ inexplicable roadblocks at the start of every game-but don’t be impressed. Every place I flew to fight villains in Metropolis looked almost the same; it just took more time to get there.

Unlike Grand Theft Auto, with its many side quests, there is nothing to do other than fight the next batch of enemies. Nothing, that is, except hunt for kittens. Mr. Mxyzptlk, a villain from the fifth dimension, has hidden 100 kittens around the city for Superman to find. This is exactly as much fun as it sounds.

After a brief tutorial, scenes from the movie begin. But instead of using the actual scenes, the game uses poorly rendered CGI versions of them.

Superman must fly toward an exclamation point that denotes a location where people are in trouble. The first battle involved Metallo, an evil robot that was also absent from the movie. While fighting him and his robots, players must keep them from doing too much damage to Metropolis. You lose if the city’s health meter, filling in for our invulnerable hero’s health meter, goes to zero.

After about 20 such battles, over four levels, you finally fight Metallo as a boss. However, the robots you fight here appear in all the future levels. Sometimes new ones appear but there are no more than 10 types of enemies, none of which were in the movie. After fighting the same enemies so many times I had to make sure I wasn’t just replaying the same level over and over again.

Finally, as Lex Luthor’s plan unfolds, some tornadoes head to Metropolis that Superman stops with a combination of heat vision and freeze breath. I off-ed the last tornado, excited to finally fight Luthor, but I couldn’t. The entire climax of the film, awkwardly edited into less than five minutes, occurs in cinematic form. And my prize for finishing the game? A level where I get to fight hundreds of the same enemies again.

Despite the complete futility of the game, being Superman is fun. Heat vision is entertaining, even though you can’t light citizens on fire. You can, however, freeze them in their tracks with freeze breath. Flying is also fun for a while, and the game offers enough different attacks and combos to be more than a button masher.

The game is worth a rental because being Superman for a little while is worth it, but the repetitive, unvaried movie tie-in will frustrate you very, very quickly.

Published on December 2, 2006 at 12:00 pm