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Avoid like Kryptonite

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: November 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Avoid the Superman Returns game like the plague. I had high hopes after playing the demo on the 360, but well... if you've played the demo you've pretty much played the game. It's pretty much the same thing ad nauseum. IT would have been better if the environment was a little more destructable, especially during the Bizarro missions where one must cause as much mayhem as possible (which means blowing up cars and setting tress on fire with your heat breath). Graphically, the city looks pretty flying above it, some of the buildings look pretty good, but then some of the textures looks like they are from a system 2 generations ago or more... honestly, you've seen better on the PS1... but these are few and far between. My BIGGEST gripe with the game is the targetting, I'm fighting Metallo and I want to target his robots that fly around him first, I target Metallo. I want to chuck a gas tanker at Metallo, I target his robots... needless to say, that gets rather old rather quickly. Some of the big battles, I'm not sure how the mechanics of them work, for example, early in the game there's a gladiator match on Warworld and because Superman can't die in this game you have to win the crowd over, but the odds are against you, as in you get hit and your opponent gets a significant boost, whereas you can pound away on him all day and only get a portion of the same boost, meanwhile, he hits you with his completely undodgable attack. Needless to say, this was a rather frustrating exercise, avoid at all costs.

Save your cash.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: November 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Flying is the ONLY pull of this game. Besides the awesome flight and superspeeding, the rest of the game is a repetitive mash of robots and dragons...save your money, and buy Spider-Man 2 for Xbox...or Gears of War for 360, those deserve your cash.

Major disappointment

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: November 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Superman Returns... Did 'you' notice flying dragons, destructive robots, flying saucers, and monsters in the movie?? No! This game has you continuously, and I mean that very much, fight against these creatures. You have to destroy them with heat vision, freeze breath, or basic attacks over and over again. Then, once in a while you get to fight Metallo, Multiple guy, Bizarro. Again, you use heat vision or basic punches, kicks, grapple moves to defeat them.

Does this sound like the movie? No. The only connection to the movie that this game has are the cutscenes. Once in a while there will be Lois typing on the computer, someone tossing a newspaper with the headline
"Superman defeats ____". I was hoping for a connection to the movie like Spider-man 2 had. But... nothing.

Freedom? Never. Yes you get to fly around Metropolis, which looks nice, but then every minute you are stopped by an emergency. Time to extinguish buildings, defeat monsters or villains, and just make sure Metropolis's health bar doesn't reach zero. That's IT. The end of the game has something new. Stop a storm. Yay? Well, after the third time you do this, it is no longer ANY fun. No visits to the Fortress of Solitude. No major conversations between Superman/Lois, Superman/Lex, or Clark/Lois. You don't get to save Lois. The cutscene does that for you!

So, does this seem like the game they promised? The fighting is ridiculously repetitive. It has Spider-man 2's XP. You fight the baddies and gain XP. Then you move on.

You do NOT get to fight Lex Luthor. The cutscene does that! Anyway, the graphics are good but the gameplay is horrible. Barely any connection to the movie. No freedom. No romantic plot with Lois. There isn't even James Marsden's character! There's no Superman JR!

If you want freedom, a beautiful city, a connection to a movie, flying high above buildings, saving people - then buy Spider-man 2. At least there you fight the villains in the movie, save MJ, and race the Black Cat.

Please - Rent before you buy.

Ends the Superman curse, says I.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I discovered the Hero sandbox genre with Spider-Man 2 and grew to love it. Being a huge fan of Bryan Singer's Superman Returns movie, I was estatic when I found out someone was making a sandbox-style video game out of it. My enthusiasm died down a bit when I heard EA was the developer. Still, as a huge fan of Superman, I was willing to give EA and this title a chance.

The final product isn't perfect, as expected. It doesn't have all the secret tokens and missions Spider-Man 2 had, and the structure of the main game is a bit linear for my tastes. Some of the missions are also quite frustrating and confusing.

That being said, Superman Returns is actually a better game than some may make you think. Superman himself plays perfectly. He has all the powers you would expect him to wield, as well as a solid arsenal of combat techniques. The flying mechanic works fantastically: Supes flys like a jet, and the he controls flawlessly in the air. Metropolis is a huge playground, filled with all sorts of objects you can swing or throw at your enemies. (Or at the citizens of the city, if you feel like going kamikaze on your game.)

Most importantly: the Man of Steel is actually invincible. He can be hit, knocked down, even KO'd. But he can't die.

Instead of monitoring Superman's health, you have to keep an eye on a Metropolis life meter. This kind of makes Returns one huge escort mission. While that sounds bad in theory, it isn't so terrible in practice. Remember, Superman is invincible. You don't have to worry about wearing your own life out, so you can go all out in defending the city. This gives the majority of missions a feel that's similar to the 'Metropolis battle' sequence in Superman II, which is definitely a plus for me.

While not the absolute best the Xbox 360 has to offer, Superman Returns is a solid sandbox game with a unique premise. It's worth a purchase for any Superman or comic fan, though certainly not before you've sampled the finest wines in the 360 cellar.

More like SuperDud than Superman.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: December 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Oh how I looked forward to this game. I followed through screen shots and trailers that were released. I also accepted the delay when EA said they were tightening up the game quality. Man I would have hated to see it before they "tightened up the quality". Like another reveiwer said, there is great potential for this game that EA failed to find. For one, yes, the game is terribly short. That may be good or bad, depending on how you feel about the game in general. You can beat this game within 6 hours. The game was fun for the first hour or so, and I still enjoyed playing it just for the feel of flying around. EA caught that pretty good. If you ever played the Spiderman games just to feel the sensation of swinging through the city, you may have more tolerance for this Superman game. I bought this the day it came out before the reviews came out. Had I waited, I would have only rented this game.

The game loosely, and I mean loosely, follows the plot line of the movie. One of the coolest moments in the movie was when Superman had to rescue the jet liner. I would have thought for sure this could have made it into the game but alas, it wasn't to be. I would have been happier if EA could have followed the movie plot more than just throwing in repetitive boss fights that happen again and again and again and again. I hope you see the point in reiterating again and again. You can't even really just enjoy flying around the city without a fight beginning. I don't even consider the graphics to be worthy of a second generation game for the 360, not with titles like Gears or War or the incredible Rainbow Six Vegas.

If you are a true hardcore fan of Superman, then I recommend a rental and if you could care less about Superman, just plain stay away from this game. I play it still just to have the freedom to fly around but I normally switch to another game as soon as the fights start up.

I have never been a huge EA fan. I felt that Need for Speed Most Wanted was a great game. Aside from that, EA has always been a mid quality publisher and developer. I consider the top games to come from UbiSoft. Just look at Madden, when EA got the exclusive contact with the NFL, there went the competition and Madden is now the only NFL licensed game out there and the lack of competition means you get the same pitiful game year after year now. I think EA has gotten to big for the pants and should focus more on game quality than just shipping out game after game. Hey, it works for UbiSoft. Also, if you want to see how EA is only interested in making the money, just check out Battlefield 2142. LOL.

As for Superman, there is a great game hidden under the trash that EA made available. Maybe next time someone other than EA can have the chance to make a great Superman game.

Mediocreman Returns

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Now, historically speaking, Superman games, in every single incarnation, haven't been worth the materials they were made with. From the old 16-bit piece of crap for the Nintendo, to the flop of epic proportions on the N64. This game breaks that trend, but just barely.

The good news first- Superman Returns is a free roamer, much to the effect of GTA or more genre appropriate Ultimate Spider-man. You can go wherever you want to go accross the vast city of Metropolis. And let me tell you, the city was beautifully designed. You can tell great effort was put forth on this engine to make every detail of the cityscape worth exploring. The characters look great, including the main one Superman, whos cape is beatifully rendered, and the detail on his outfit is phenominal. The gameplay is unique in the fact that the developers took into account Superman's invulnerability, and made the city itself with a health bar. This is a unique idea, but this also brings me to the bad news.

The bad new- The city's vulnerability makes some missions in this game down right frustrating. When you have 5 or 6 robots scattering at super speed in all different directions, its more than a chore to have to round them up and take them down without doing damage to the city yourself. This also brings to mind the control problems. While you may act and work in super speed, your camera doesn't, often hindering you, espcially when taking on threats in flight. You spend much of your time with the camera trying to locate the threat, only to be outrun because your camera doesn't respond very quickly. And when you finally do get to lay the smack down, the combos have awful responses, especially the bigger ones, which often leaves you using the same attacks over and over just to beat the threat. The story, while loosely based on the movie, is very 1 dimensional, and you find the FMV sequences to be more of an annoyance than helpful and fun. Also, you'll find that it takes you about as much time to complete the game as it does to actually watch the movie.

The game is definately one you want to rent before you decide to buy. While its a definate treat for the die hard Superman fans (such as myself) the quality of game is sorely lacking, though not to the extent of previous incarnations. It's a game thats fun to go back to every once in a while to soar the skies of Metropolis and wail on some baddies, but its not the gaming experience I'm sure the die hard fans were hoping for.

Experience flying like only Superman can!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Hi, i'm a big Superman fan and have played many of the older and newer Superman games, with the exception of the Ninteno 64 version, in this review i'll get into some of the high and low points of the game and my overall feeling.

High Points:

You can't get much higher than flying Superman to the top of the world. The overall graphics and visuals on Superman Returns for the Xbox 360 are absolutely stunning. And the sound through my 5.1 digital surround system is amazing, (less impressive is basic TV Audio output). Between the stunning visuals and 5.1 surround, it truly looks and feels as if you're in a living breathing city. You can be standing on the sidewalk one moment, watching the city, vibrant and alive, people and cars passing by, then the next moment, super-speed fly as high as you can, looking down on the fabulous skyline. In super-speed flight, as you accelerate you make a couple of sonic booms like in the movies, which is a nice effect.

The Super Powers of Superman that are rendered in the game are done very well, although you don't have command of "all" of his powers as you may have been lead to believe, you do still have most of his important / best known abilities. As you progress through the game the power and effectiveness of his powers increase. You can also vary the strength of his abilities, for example you can use Superman's super breath to cause a light breeze and gradually poor on the power using the right trigger till you're at tornado strength winds, or super-size his power with a charged up super burst of super-breath, heat-vision, or freeze-breath.

Overall Gameplay:

In this game Superman does not have a health meter, instead the city has a health meter and Superman has a "stamina" meter for when he gets hit or uses his super abilities such as heat-vision, super-breath or freeze-breath. If Superman completely looses his stamina he'll be down for the count for a few seconds then get back up. To prevent any down time you can fly Superman towards the sun for a quick stamina re-charge.

You can lift up most any object in the game, people, cars, trucks, statues, signs, parts of buildings, heat them up, freeze them, use them as weapons, throw them, etc.

The game is loosely based on the movie with the occasional cut scene showing off similar key moments which go in line with the Superman Returns movie. None of the enemies you actually fight in the game itself were in the movie. Some of these enemies include Mongul, Metallo, Bizarro, robots and other strange unidentifiable creatures.

If you want to fight some baddies you can fly to the top of the world, looking down you will eventually see markers appear across the city indicating where bad things are / will happen when you fly to that location. You get to fight the above mentioned baddies, over and over and over again. For you button mashers out there it can get a bit tedious and more difficult to beat, but for those of you who think outside the box you can find many different and creative ways to tackle your foes, always keeping it interesting and changing up your attacks. My advice is to use some of Superman's better combo's as they become available, they're not difficult to master and much more effective. Also throwing cars, and other random objects are also highly effective against certain enemies, sometimes more so than just hitting them.

When fights insue across the town you will have ample opportunity to rescue downed citzens and fly them to help. There are also the occasional 5 alarm building fires you get to blow out.

They're races you can perform against Myxilplick (don't mind the spelling). The races add a nice little diversion from the normal game play. They're also 100 hidden kittens all over the city which will add powers-up's to the city's health and I don't know what else. You can also play as Bizzaro and have some fun tearing up the town or go bowling with the daily planet globe (which you can do as Superman as well)

Low Points and Suggested improvements:

The missions get very repetitive, but using some creativity in how you handle them or tackle your foes will help to break up the monotiny.

The city is beautiful and huge, but it would have been nice if you could have entered some of the buildings, maybe change to Clark Kent, maybe add some more interesting and diverse missions, puzzles or tasks rather than the same boring baddies over and over.

Unlike the games claims that you have "All of Supermans powers" you don't. You don't have most of Superman's Vision abilities, which include X-Ray, Telescopic and Microscopic visions. It really would have been nice at minimum, to have had Superman's telescopic vision, so that I could be positioned anywhere in the city and zoom in on any location with his (unfortunatly non-existent) telescopic vision.

The 100 hidden cats in the game that you can rescue can't be touched if bad guys suddenly show up unannounced or unexpectedly. This was a major irritation when I finally found some kittens and as I approached the kitten the game decided to throw some bad guys at me. When this happens the game doesn't allow you to save the kitten, so you're only option is to either fight or run, and hope you can find the kitten again when you get back. Again, this was majorly annoying and happened a few too many times.

Superman can't dive into the water or land on boats or cars (although you can toss them). At minimum you should be able to land on to the boats at the piers. It would have been a great bonus to submerge into the beautiful oceans as well, but I guess we can't have everything.

I don't like that once I pick up a car or object that the "only" way I can put it down is to toss it away, it would be nice to just be able to gently pick something like a car up, and place it back down again without wrecking the place if I don't want to.

When you're trying to save injured citizens, if there happens to be a non-injured citizen walking by or standing next to them, Superman has often picked up the healthy citzen instead of the one that's hurt. This has happened a few too many times and can be quite irritating. This can also happen during a fight where I may have intended to pick up an enemy or an object and instead end up picking up a passing by citizen.

The flying is great fun, though I would prefer a couple of changes in the control scheme, which would include being able to invert the up / down controls for flying. Also removing the necessity to press the "Y" button to take off or land. I'd much rather Superman automatically land when he aproaches / touches any ground surface, and using a tap of the Y to initiate a jump, (which Superman can't currently do) and holding Y to do the super take-off or maybe a super-jump.

Once you're done with the game you can't go back and select any bad guys or chapters to go over again, though not many "sandbox" style games allow you to do that. It would be nice to be able to fight Bizzaro or Mongul again on demand, or at least make them randomly appear in the random happenings that go on in the game once the story line has been completed.

I can see why they created a city "health bar" but at the same time it sucks if you just want to wreak some havoc and smash things, because if you do too much damage to the city (unless you're playing as Bizzaro) it ends the game. Thankfully there are cheat codes available to give the city unlimited health, as well as a code to play as Bizzaro.

Final Conclusion and Summary:

Overall I enjoyed the game, Metropolis looks spectacular and it's great fun to fly and use Superman's abilities, even if you don't have them all. Sadly though, the overall game play and missions become very repetitive with the only way of making them more interesting lieing in your ability to become more creative in how you tackle your enemies. It took me about 10 / 11 hours to complete the Story line, and about 12 / 13 hours for 100% completion (even though I didn't rescue all the kittens)

A better overall Superman game was for the PS2 called Superman, Shadow of Apokolips, based on the Animated series, and utilized Superman's other abilities, gave Superman tasks to peform as both Superman and Clark Kent that were fun, interesting and challenging, some of which requiring use of his X-Ray Vision to see through things, not to mention being able to use Superman's telescopic vision to help with different strategies.

For those of you who aren't die hard fans of Superman then this is only a "rental" quality game. But for those like me, I'm always going to have fun going back to the game from time to time so that I can have fun soaring the skys as Superman, (even though there's nothing much else of extreme interest to do when the story line's complete), then I would suggest buying it, either used or new. If the game had more elements like in the PS2's Superman Shawdow of Apokolips, it would have been a much better game.

Great Game. Great Game Disc Quality.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

There's allot of button mashing. Other than that, this game is great like Grand Theft Auto for children under 6 years old. Not recommended for adults who already played Grand Theft Auto. This game is strictly for children whose parents will not allow children to watch realistic violent games like GTA series.

Never Knew Metropolis Had So Many Robots :l

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

i loved this game. the graphics are awesome and i can not express how much FUN it was to fly around such a Large world, inbetween buildings, underpasses, along bridges and then dive from about 500,000 feet in the air straight into the ocean and skim along the water at TOP speed....it is truly an amazing thing and has made me LOVE this game since iv played the demo and then rented it...but something buggs me...

too many robots :| youd think youd be able to save some people...put out a some fires...stop some thieves...a couple shoot outs...meteor showers...stop a plane from falling out the sky...maybe even a few spats with Lex Luthor wouldnt hurt. and things that Superman does in everyday life. but for some Dumb reason...every 10 seconds, the city is being attacked by what? Robots :| annoying...hard to kill...wayy toooo mannyy of themm....robots. after about the 10th battle with a STREET full of robots, youll be tired of it...

then i heard something about Dragons from one of the reviewers on here as well. thats just too much Stupid for me :| i dont want to fight anymore robots...and definately not Huff the Magic Dragon and 100,000 of his friends.

Buy it used at Gamestop for 20 bucks and return it in 7 days for something else...ill stick to Spiderman 2 on the original xbox for my superhero high...

iLL .

This game had such potential....

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: November 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

...but failed to deliver! Superman is arguably one of the best comic book super heroes. I had such high hopes for Superman Returns. Unfortunately this game is by far the worst game I've played on Xbox 360. Viva Pinata and Lego Star Wars are better than this game. In fact I can honestly say this is the worst game I've EVER played. (and I have a pretty sizeable game library) I'll start with the good, since there is so much wrong with this game.

Pros: 1) Breaking the sound barrier while flying. Hands down this is the best part of the game. If you want to experience this, download the demo on XBL.
2) Huge open ended city. This city is designed to be seen from a distance. If you look closely you'll notice the programmers used copy and past for a lot of buildings and textures
3) Easy Xbox 360 achievement points. You can unlock all of the achievement points in about 12 hours of gameplay. (even less than that if you don't go for the "12 hours of gameplay" achievement)
4) Ummm... that's it!

Cons: 1) REPETATIVE!! The bad guys in between bosses are all the same! There's no variety! The main bosses all have about 3 lines that they repeat over and over and over again! To quote Will Ferrell from Zoolander, "They're all the same!! I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"
2) Not fun! This is the greatest sin a video game can commit! The game started off fun, but after 6 hours of playing I'm so frustrated I can't take it anymore. My wife even commented that it's not even fun to watch.
3) Poor controls. The controls are great if you're just flying around exploring the city, but once you get into a battle things quickly devolve. The lock on system is terrible. If you lock on to the wrong thing (a pedestrian or car instead of the bad guy) you can't just cycle through the available things to lock on (like every other game where you can lock on to things) you have to unlock, get your curser right on the guy you want and try to lock on again. As bad guys are constantly moving this quickly becomes a game of trial and error. The super speed button is great when you start flying and want to go straight up. It's also great for flying far above the city, but trying to use it while close to the ground or during a battle is horrid. For these situations it needs to be more of a gradual speed up. You're going 20 mph one second and 200 the next. It's very easy to fly right past your target and run into cars and buildings. That's another complaint! If you're superman, the man of steel, flying faster than the speed of sound and you run into a building, that building won't stop you. You should fly right through that building, not the case with this game. You simply leave a small dent in the building as you come to a complete stop. It's the same story while running and being completely halted by cars.
4) No story! In between fighting the same guys over and over you see clips from the movie. (They're not really from the movie; it's animated but the voice acting sounds like the stars from the movie)
5) Did I mention how repetitive this game is?

To sum things up, breaking the sound barrier is fun; everything else about this game is NOT! Now that Superman Returns is in the bargain bin, it MIGHT be worth it if you're really hard up for quick easy achievement points. But those points come with a price; it may be the longest 12 hours you spend in front of your TV. For the same monetary price I'd recommend Lego Star Wars. It's a lot more fun! The achievements take a lot longer and are a lot harder, but it is a truly fun game.

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