Below are user reviews of Superman Returns and on the right are links to professionally written reviews.
The summary of review scores shows the distribution of scores given by the professional reviewers for Superman Returns.
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User Reviews (1 - 2 of 2)
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About what you might expect
2
Rating: 2,
Useful: 9 / 10
Date: December 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User
The Superman franchise has never had a good track record in the video game world, and that trend continues in the hands of publishing and developing giant EA. Superman Returns for the DS is actually better than it's home console bretheren, but not by much. Featuring some surprisingly good 3-D graphics and animation, Superman Returns allows you to control the Man of Steel in some bland, but nicely designed, environments featuring time-based missions. That's right, your biggest enemy is the game clock ticking away at the top of the screen as you take on baddies, jump in and out of your secret identity, and perform some rescues. And that's it. That's all you do, and it doesn't last very long. However, that may be a good thing, because the repetitive gameplay is what kills Superman Returns. The control scheme is numbing, and any kind of features to take advantage of the DS' capabilities that are here are thrown in as an afterthought only. All considering, Superman Returns for the DS is probably what you may have suspected it to be: a derivative, licensed super hero game from a mega publisher that lacks anything to set it apart from the pack. It may be worth a look for Superman fans, but that's it.
What a clunker
2
Rating: 2,
Useful: 3 / 3
Date: April 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User
The main problem with this game- and indeed the thing that sets it FAR apart from its counterparts on the consoles, is that there is no, and I mean NO free-roaming. You get absolutely no time to fly around, looking at stuff, practicing your landing, speed, and moves. Instead, it plops you right into time-based trials where the clock is ticking, and you have no idea how to make your man of steel move gracefully. (This because you've had no time to work with him, or do any kind of training mission) In fact, no matter how familiar you get with Superman's control scheme, he will never move gracefully in this game.
Flying is clunky. Superman is basically standing in mid-air at all times. He can move back, forward, or turn left/right (all with the D-pad). He can fly up or down (left and right shoulder buttons) and that's it. Without the 2nd analog stick that controls camera angles on the consoles, there is no graceful way to steer your hero or make him actually fly. Instead, in this game Superman hovers and turns, hovers forward, turns again- it's more like operating a tank and gives you absolutely no sense of real flying- which is arguably the only thing that made the console games fun.
The missions are short and kind of lame, and instead of free-roaming into each new scenario, the game gives you a sad overhead map of Metropolis laid out like a honeycomb. You have to click each sequential cell and basically draw a path from your starting point to where there is some trouble on the map. When you click on the honeycomb cell where trouble is located, the top screen just appears with Superman in that location, and your boring time trial begins.
I don't really recommend this game to anyone. At least go with the console version, because the free-roaming and flying around is actually pretty fun. Robbing you of that experience means that the DS version doesn't even qualify as a "good enough for a hand-held" choice.
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