It’s hard to
develop a game in which you play the role of Superman. Most video
game protagonists take on daunting tasks and face impossible odds in
defense of righteousness. But what constitutes a daunting task when
you’re immortal and invulnerable? What are impossible odds to
someone who can travel through time, fly through space, and lift
apartment complexes with his bare hands?
The Superman
movies solved this problem by placing less-super folk (read, you and
me) in peril, and forced Superman to spend most of his time saving
us, rather than defending himself. And that’s the tactic Circus
Freak took in Superman: The Man of Steel. Gorgeous cities and
interesting villains aside, it is the developer’s fundamental
inability to provide interesting challenges for Superman that make
this title a flop.
Gameplay
The designers at
Circus Freak have boiled down Superman’s powers into eight basic
abilities: strength, flight, super speed, heat vision, freezing
breath, x-ray vision, telescopic vision and super hearing. “Super
Hearing” is represented by a small display at the top center of the
screen, which guides you to your next objective. This works quite
well and is a nice nod to an oft-overlooked super ability.
The three combat
abilities are each mapped to a button on the XboX controller: A and
X are punches, B is your heat vision, Y is your freezing breath. The
white and black buttons toggle your X-ray vision and telescopic
vision respectively. All of these function reasonably well.
The first sign of trouble is the convoluted way in
which Circus Freak decided to implement Superman’s movement. The
controls are divided into four distinct sections: Running, Hovering,
Flying, and Lock-on. There is little gameplay difference between
these modes other than the fact that the control functions of both
sticks and both triggers vary wildly. For example, while flying the
R trigger makes you accelerate quickly. While locked on to a target,
it is the left thumbstick button that triggers quick
acceleration. Why? Who knows. Even more frustrating is the
indecision regarding the Y-axis. In some modes the Y-axis is
inverted, while in others it is not. Simply flying near an enemy
will change your mode, so switching modes unexpectedly is not at all
uncommon.
But once these difficulties are overcome, what have
you got? Well, Braniac-13 is attempting to build himself a body
right in downtown metropolis. To that end, there are robots
appearing all over the city who have no purpose other than to “drain
the technology” from nearby buildings and transfer it to Braniac-13.
In what appears to be an unrelated story thread, fires are popping
up all over metropolis. It’s up to Superman to single-handedly
destroy the robots, put out the fires, destroy more robots,
extinguish several blazing infernos, and, uh, punch some more
robots.
You may have noticed that invulnerability was not on
the list of Superman’s powers. It appears that Superman has been
letting himself go recently, as just a few strikes from a robot will
finish him. This makes no sense at all, even in the game fiction.
Fortunately destroying robots gives you back some health, so
Superman shouldn’t have too much difficulty there, other than the
logical conundrum of how destroying robots can heal you (or how
those robots could hurt you in the first place). I guess we’ll just
chalk it up to the brilliant mind of Braniac-13.
But your real
enemy in this game is the time limit.
All missions enforce strict time limits, and failing
one objective forces you to restart the sequence of objectives from
the beginning. A typical sequence might be:
Extinguish fire
Extinguish fire
Extinguish two fires
Extinguish 3 fires.
Superman himself seems bemused by the quantity of
fires, as he seems compelled to exclaim “Another fire!” or “Not
another fire!” as each new fire appears. Time limits are quite fair,
once you understand your objectives. Expect to fail each mission
somewhere around the third objective, forcing you to replay through
the first two missions, only to fail on the fourth.
I’ll lay off the fires now. Extinguishing fires is a
fine Superman tradition, and it is handled well enough in the game,
but clearly it was meant to be 5 or 10% of the gameplay, rather than
40%+.
From time to time, Superman is required to lift
something (like a car) and transport it to another location. I found
these objectives dull at first, but as the endless fires and robots
wore on, these became my favorite missions. The controls for
burdened flight were pleasantly sluggish (I don’t mean this
sarcastically) and these missions often involved saving people
directly, which made me feel somewhat heroic.
The rest of the game centers around smashing robots,
and the occasional boss. Everything you smash is color-coded either
purple, yellow, or green. Yellow enemies are vulnerable to punches,
green enemies are vulnerable to your freezing breath, and purple
enemies are vulnerable to heat vision. Since all three attacks are
in easy reach, destroying robots is no problem. The only difficulty
might be locating the robots quickly enough, or remembering which
way is currently “up” on the control stick fast enough to approach
them.
Freeze breath is a charge-and-release affair, which
gives it a nice timing. Punches come in several varieties depending
upon the direction pressed, though I didn’t notice any functional
difference. The Heat Vision comes up short, with both a rapid-fire
mode (it fires as quickly as you can press the button) and a
charge-up mode. I didn’t notice any advantage to charge mode. 2-3
full charges were required to finish enemies, for about 8 seconds of
game play. Alternatively, 6-8 quick bursts could destroy a robot in
about 1.5 seconds, making that the clear winner. Heat Vision also
has more range than punches or freeze breath, and purple enemies
were ludicrously easy to defeat as a result.
The final boss
battle against Braniac-13 was quite solid, and incorporated all of
the elements from throughout the game. Good luck staying awake that
long, though.
Graphics
The graphics on
this game were brought to my attention almost eight months before
the game came out, mostly because of the amazing cities the game
presents. The city geometry is very impressive, and I felt as though
the city stretched on forever. Nice use of pre-rendered shadows on
the ground and in enclosed spaces really brought things to life. The
characters and effects were also nicely done, though the human
character models in the movies were quite appallingly bad.
In game, however,
the character poses, especially Superman’s, look quite exciting.
Superman’s animations seem a bit stiff at times, but overall I’d say
that I found his presentation sufficiently magnamous.
I’d like to change
tenor for a moment to mention the “fortress of solitude” menu system
from which players unlock secret bonuses and set their options.
Every time I had to exit to the shell I was driven mad by the menu’s
abrupt camera changes and abhorrent sound. Why anyone would saddle a
perfectly functional menu system with these painful elements is
beyond me.
Audio
As I’ve already
mentioned, the sound in the menu is horrific. Fortunately, the
brains behind that blunder do not seem to have been at the helm for
the rest of the game. Sound effects are crisp and clear, and the
balance of sounds is such that no sound ever overpowers the others.
That is, until a movie begins. The movies seem to have been balanced
to a different audio standard. A much louder standard. I learned to
turn the volume way down as soon as I completed a mission, as the
between-mission cinematics were about six times the volume of the
regular game. That aside, the voice-acting was quite passable, and
the voice acting for Bizzarro Superman was smack-on-funny. Really,
the writers on this game deserve some credit for stringing together
so many disparate elements with such panache.
Overall
Superman: The Man
of Steel takes a little getting used to. By the third mission you
should have the basics under control, and should have no problem
saving cars, putting out fires, and smashing robots. Unfortunately,
you have nothing to look forward to other than more cars, fires, and
robots. Despite all the hard work which was obviously poured into
the visuals, audio and story, someone forgot to add in a game to
take advantage of them. This is a novelty rental, at best.
