Superman Returns – Quick Impressions

It wasn’t till the second day of E3 that I managed to carve out some time to explore EA’s jam packed booth. I have to confess my eyes glazed over while I was walking around, there simply wasn’t anything I was interested in seeing… except Superman Returns (huge, huge, HUGE Superman fan I am). I watched the trailer on display and lamented the fact that it wasn’t playable on the show floor, I’d had reservations about all the screens I’d seen so far and really wanted my fears to be proven unfounded. I turn around to leave the booth and what do I see in front of me? Ol’ Big Blue himself is what.

Find out what I thought after the jump!

It wasn’t till the second day of E3 that I managed to carve out some time to explore EA’s jam packed booth. I have to confess my eyes glazed over while I was walking around, there simply wasn’t anything I was interested in seeing… except Superman Returns (huge, huge, HUGE Superman fan I am). I watched the trailer on display and lamented the fact that it wasn’t playable on the show floor, I’d had reservations about all the screens I’d seen so far and really wanted my fears to be proven unfounded. I turn around to leave the booth and what do I see in front of me? Ol’ Big Blue himself is what.

First up, let’s discuss the 360 version. Remember that target video EA showed a little while back? No..where… close. The booth attendant was standing there flying Superman around a very plain looking Metropolis with bland textures and horrible jaggies, telling us how the game was still only in its infancy and there was a lot more work to be done. He might as well have just saved his breath, it was painfully obvious. I’m not saying EA can’t or won’t reach the visual quality seen in that target video, (once bitten) but they’ve got a lot of work ahead of them. Let’s hope the recent delay allows them time to polish and tweak things.

The game doesn’t look like this right now.

And as for the PSP version? Disappointing. That’s really the best way to describe it at this point anyway. I have no idea how far along the game is but EA really shouldn’t have had this on display. There was no discernible lighting in effect, loads of aliasing, graphical glitches and a very boring looking city to fly around. The objective in the demo was also way too derivative, apparently there were a number of trucks driving around Metropolis smuggling “contraband”, you were to fly around and use your X-ray vision to spot the trucks… and then toss them into space (I kid you not). As I said the mission was extremely derivative and reminiscent of those seen in Activision’s Spiderman series of games (although this game looked much closer to the Spiderman game on the original PlayStation than those on PS2).

Perhaps I’m wailing on EA a little unfairly though, to be fair a lot of the games shown at E3 were surprisingly rough, and games do generally get more polished with added development time. EA’s got tons of cash to throw at the problem (if there is one) and a fair amount of time, so who knows. Just don’t muck up the license!