The Death and Return of Superman

The Good
I honestly really want to like this game. It's got very nice graphics and music. The controls are very nice. It's simple, but decent. You can punch guys, pick up and throw large objects including vehicles, shoot lasers from your eyes, and fly. There really is a lot going for it.

The Bad
This game is very frustrating. To begin with, your heat vision attack is completely useless. It does such small damage that it's totally unusable as a normal attack. It has the added effect of stunning enemies, which could have been a nice effect, but most normal enemies are only stunned for about two seconds or so, and bosses aren't stunned at all. If you could use it to stun bosses, this might actually have been useful. Mostly, however, the real issue is that everything in the game hurts you, knocks you around, and otherwise prevents you from doing what you want to do. This is especially maddening when you're supposed to be Superman, a guy who's nigh invulnerable. It just makes you want to scream every time a boulder, chainsaw, or Molotov cocktail flattens you. Most of these attacks are impossible to avoid because of the somewhat slow movement of a guy who's supposed to be faster than a speeding bullet.

The Bottom Line
All-in-all, it's a somewhat mediocre beat-'em-up. It really does have potential, but the difficulty and slow movement make it irritating to play.

The Good
This game follows the storyline found in the DC comics of the same name fairly well. You get a chance to play characters you will probably never get a chance to play again (Superboy, Steel, the Cyborg and the Eradicator). From a graphics perspective, the scenery changes notably enough to leave the player wanting to see what happens next. Smooth gameplay and nice tight controls kept me playing this one to the finish.

The Bad
When all is said and done, this is a standard beat-em-up with a handful of different enemy designs. It doesn't make much difference what character you are, and that's some wasted potential.

The Bottom Line
You've seen it all before, but it was one of the better Superman titles.

The Good
The graphics, both in the game and in the interstitials, are a great recreation of the sources material. There are all kinds of great touches to the animation, like blowing capes and such.

Every few levels, there's a shooter section where you fly along and use your heat vision or equivalent to shoot down flying enemies. This is a nice diversion and keeps the walking around and punching people from getting too dull.

You get to play as five different Supermen throughout the game, which is pretty cool. They aren't just palette-swaps either. They all have their own animations, which are quite nice across the board.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the enemies are just palette-swaps. I'd be surprised if there were a dozen in the whole game. Like most super-hero games of the early nineties, you walk from left to right and punch and kick legions of identical enemies. I can't think of any super-heroes who ever actually did this except the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is perhaps why their game is the best regarded out of this genre.

While it it's great to get to play as five characters and they all look quite different, they play exactly the same. All of the have a short-range attack, a long-range attack and a special that clears the screen. They all can fly, but this really doesn't do anything except in the shooter levels. In the source comics, they had rather different powers, so this comes across as unimaginative or maybe just lazy.

On a related note, The Death and Return of Superman suffers from terrible Nintendo logic. Why is Superman getting hurt by falling rocks and molotov cocktails? Why does it take him half a dozen punches to knock out a street punk? For that matter, why are these jerks attacking him in the first place? You'd think they'd want Doomsday stopped, too.

The fighting lacks any discernable depth. Mostly, it's mashing on the attack button as heat vision is too slow to be very useful. Occasionally, you grab someone and throw them or pick them up and punch them in the face repeatedly, but it seemed to be random.

The Bottom Line
The game is fairly similar to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game with Superman, except there's no multiplayer, the moves are simpler, all the characters are exactly alike, there's less variety in the enemies and the bosses, for the most part, are less interesting. Also, there are some side-scroller bits thrown in, but they're not any better. Other than good graphics and a good license, there's little to distinguish it from the multitude of other 16-bit superhero beat 'em ups.

Despite all these qualms, this is probably the best Superman game out there. The guy hasn't had great luck in the department, so I'd still recommend if you really need to play as Superman. Otherwise, maybe buy it if it's cheap.

The Good
I have discovered the world of Superman with this game, and what used to be a boring super-hero has now become really interesting to me. The story is good, Doomsday is one God damn villain, and the "clones" of Superman are as cool as the original. Oh, and some Gradius-like levels to make it enjoyable and unrepetitive, yes Sir.

The Bad
Ten levels and no passwords. Pretty hard to finish this game knowing that. And well, enemies are kinda weird. Not sure they really come from the comic book but hey, I might be wrong.

The Bottom Line
It's Final Fight with Superman, and maybe the only good game of the franchise. Nuff said. Now excuse me, I want to read some Superman comics.

The Good
Having a couple of different Superman variations to play as is a nice touch, as well as the different moves Superman could do (throwing people off of buildings, smashing them into walls, etc.). There are also a couple of villains that have been taken from the comic books and put into the game.

The Bad
All of the Supermen have almost exactly the same attacks. The landscapes are really uninspired and are repeated through the entire level. Every flying level is verbatim of the last and plays like an incredibly rushed shoot 'em up. The difficulty is ridiculous and you only get to fight 2-3 of the same enemies through the entire level(fighting takes forever and levels are stretched out longer than they should be).

The Bottom Line
I love brawl/beat 'em up type games, but this one is untouchable. The only reasons I could see owning/buying this game is either you're a huge Superman fan or you actually liked Superman 64.