Review: Superman Returns (DS)
Score: 73
Yawn, yawn, another movie spin-off. Still, i suppose the characters have to come from somewhere in order to be recognisable. Superman Returns contains a few nods to the movie itself, by including some of the same 'disasters', but other than that it's mainly based around fairly standard 'maze' gameplay.
The maze in this case is the city of Metropolis, with the skyscrapers forming the 'walls'. Although you'd expect that Superman could just rise into the sky and zoom round the planet at the speed of light, in this game he's limited to moving through the city 'tile' (area) by tile. And within each tile it's a question of zooming between the skyscrapers.
On each turn of the game you're presented by one or more disasters, each of which need clearing up using either heat vision, super breath or super strength - and if you don't clear any of them up, the city takes a 'health' hit. And the longer you can keep the city's health above zero, the longer you stay in the game.
Complicating things are the presence of a number of villains from the movie and from the Superman back catalogue, each of which also wreaks havoc on the city and has to be confronted and fought (usually using a dance step, Tamagotchi-like button pressing sequence). There's an element of strategy in that you need to decide whether to go after villains or disasters first, and time is never on your side, with a clock ticking on each turn and the time allowed gradually being extended if you're doing well.
You're led through the action with on-screen prompts over what to do and which buttons to press to do it and there's a nice sense of urgency to everything that happens.
The graphics and animations in Superman Returns are reasonable without ever being really spectacular. The dual-screen touch interface of the DS and DS Lite is a bit under-utilised and you do get the feeling at times that this is basically a GameBoy Advance title that's had a few square centimetres bolted onto the bottom... having a whole bottom screen and a touch-sensitive one to boot, you'd have thought that it would be used for more than showing a few scores and/or maps...
Ultimately Superman Returns is fun to play though and will certainly while away a few hours. The actual action is a bit repetitive, but there's enough of an adrenaline rush from all the flying against the clock to keep most people happy.
(It's worth noting that there's also a single-cartridge multi-player mode, but we didn't try this.)