Superman Returns

The health bar belongs to the city. That single design decision is the reason this tie-in is still worth pulling off the shelf: Superman himself is invulnerable, as he should be, so the meter that matters tracks how much of Metropolis is left standing. Let a tornado shred a district or let a stray missile take out a tower block and you lose ground you cannot easily win back. It is a genuinely clever answer to the oldest problem in superhero games, and it arrived in a licensed cash-in nobody expected to think that hard.

EA Tiburon built a Metropolis of some real scale for 2006, and flying across it remains the strongest thing on offer. Acceleration has weight, the camera pulls back as you gather speed, and the skyline resolves ahead of you fast enough to sell the fantasy of a man crossing a city in seconds. On PS2 the price is obvious. Textures are flat, pop-in is constant, and the frame rate sags whenever a set piece asks for too much at once. The 360 version was the showcase; this one is the compromise build, and it never pretends otherwise.

Combat is the weaker half. Punching thugs and robots resolves into repeated combo strings with occasional heat vision and freeze breath, and because you cannot be hurt, the fights lack any tension of their own. The game tries to supply it through collateral damage, which mostly means being punished for the physics rather than for playing badly. The boss encounters fare better, since Metallo, Bizarro and Mongul each demand something other than mashing, but the connective tissue between them is thin.

What it does not do is follow its own film very closely. The plot borrows characters and a general shape, then fills the open world with comic-book villains the movie never touched, which is the right instinct and also a sign of how little the source material offers a game about a man who mainly lifts things. Side activities repeat quickly. Rescue a citizen, extinguish a fire, break up a robbery, repeat.

Judged as a licensed release from an era that produced dozens of them, it is above the line, mostly on the strength of one good idea and the flight model that carries it. Judged now, it is a rough, unfinished-feeling city with a great premise buried in it. The best moment is always the same one: hovering above the towers at dusk, before something starts falling.