Superman Returns preview

Argh! Following Catwoman and Batman Begins, EA has a very low standing with me, when it comes to super hero games. Thus, it was with nervous twitches under my right eye that I entered the closed EA booth at the X05 in Amsterdam, where the publisher was presenting Superman Returns. The game will be published next year simultaneously with the movie of the same name (ed. Batman begins was without a doubt hot, but hopefully DC won’t run all their heroes through this concept. “Green Lantern lights again”, anyone?). The game was announced on the first day of X05.

At first glance there’s two good news. First off, the game is developed by Tiburon – a studio you probably have not heard of, unless you play Madden or one of the other American EA sport games. With its many titles they’ve harvested loads of prizes and awards in the US. For Superman, Tiburon has gathered highly qualified developers, who are all cartoon fans, from all over the world. They are used to deliver quality in spite of EA’s very strict deadlines. Secondly the game does not follow the movie plot, but offers the same free game play as Spider-Man 2, Ultimate Spider-Man and Hulk Ultimate Destruction.

The first great Superman game?

The reason that there’s never been a good Superman game is plainly that the developers have failed to take him seriously. However, Tiburon is an exception, and you can tell by the game’s concept. At the X05 it presented a techdemo of the game, which of course still was rather ragged, but still managed to make you want to play the game, due to a number of cool ideas. Superman has the entire Metropolis at his disposal, which gives over 200 square kilometres of city, loads of mini-games and more than 10.000 buildings to explore. Contrary to other super hero games, though, you move extremely fast. In the game Superman runs almost 500 km/h and flies over 1200 km/h.

Tiburon has taken a completely difference approach to Superman’s abilities than most developers. Superman is (in the DC-world) the ultimate super hero, and he shouldn’t be a weakling in the beginning of the game. So you start out with all abilities from mission 1. The challenge will be to learn how to use them and combine them the right way, and at the same time keeping an eye on your energy level – the only real limit to your powers. Lastly, you shouldn’t expect to deal with silly missions like capturing bank robbers and stuff like that. Superman saves Metropolis from the BIG dangers; the real heroic deeds are your metier. You move trains and oil tankers, or stop towers from collapsing and of course battle against real super villains. Many of the missions require you to learn how to combine your different abilities. For example, if you need to put out a fire you can fly to a nearby lake and freeze the water and then smelt the huge lump of ice over the fire with your heat sight.

Metallo isn’t the name of the local scout organisation

In the techdemo we saw how a giant robot fittingly named Metallo, ravaged the centre of Metropolis. Metallo sucks all metal to him and starts out as a moderate robot about a few meters tall, but soon grows to 20 meters, if he is able to suck up enough metal. Were Metallo to swallow a tank, he would also convert a finger to cannon and so on. Superman made a few attempts with the normal super powers, such as the heat-rays, but they did not really injure the robot. The huge obelisk that Superman tore loose, however, did the trick just fine. Everything in the city has realtime physical properties and can be used and destroyed. The cool part is that if you lift something it changes the balance of Superman, forcing you to compensate with your joypad. The heavier the things the larger impact on the balance.

The destructions of the city are a deciding factor for whether Superman can complete his missions. He cannot simply be killed by any random bad guy, since that would go against the concept of being Earth’s mightiest super hero. So instead it is your status as the protector of Metropolis that is at stake. If the bad guys or natural disasters destroys too much of the town, Superman has failed the citizens. In the techdemo we saw Metallo smash a giant building which was quite a display of game physics. The buildings also get small damages and dents, if Superman flies into them with high speed.

The techdemo left me with quite an ambiguous feeling about the visuals. On one hand the demo was still raw and limited and for that reason did not give a real feeling of what the graphics will be like in the final game. On the other hand there were a lot of impressive effects, such as the tornados around Metallo’s feet, which literally sucked up metal. We also saw some animation sequences that offered some completely floating transition from when Superman flew to him running. So I still managed to get high expectations for the game graphics.

Superman Returns is being developed primarily for Xbox 360, but will also be published for the current generation of consoles – although in a toned down version, when it comes to graphics and physics. Expect to see both game and movie sometime during the summer, 2006.