Man of Steel Review

Punch-drunk Superman

Man of Steel is not a great game by any means, but its primary failure is in a lack of understanding of how to capture the experience of being Superman. This version of the last son of Krypton is not the aspirational ideal for humanity, the self-sacrificial allegory, or the adaptable charmer. He’s a brute through and through, whose problems are merely a series of things to punch. In terms of a repetitive rough-and-tumble brawl, Man of Steel delivers reasonably well... but we don’t see Superman actually save anyone.

To its credit, this game adaptation of Zach Snyder's Superman reboot does accurately capture the film’s fight scenes. Rather than a cohesive sense of plot, the sequence of missions boils down to a series of similar fights against a parade of Kryptonian goons – with an occasional appearance from a named movie character, naturally. The punches land with force, the concrete crackles with the momentum of a take off, the surroundings crumble like matchstick houses as the titans fight, and excellent sound design backs it all up. The problem is that’s all it does, over and over, for hours.

The story does contextualize itself slightly, through a series well-produced motion comics that summarize the broad strokes of the film’s plot, along with a few added elements to justify more

punching. The self-serious tone matches the fight sequences, but they were more colorful and splashy than the game itself, and I enjoyed the visual break.

Battling Zod’s seemingly endless series of soldiers might be more enjoyable if the fighting portions didn’t seem intermittently engineered for failure. Since you spend XP on upgrading your abilities and character attributes, enemies are regularly balanced to outmatch you. Dodge speed, in particular, became a rough patch late in the campaign – pressing the prompt with plenty of time to spare still resulted in damage due to Superman’s slow dodge speed. The fights then became a dull, monotonous chore as I was forced to grind for XP to progress. Fun as it may be to hear masonry shatter when you send a superpowered foe crashing through a brick wall the first time, it loses some effect after several dozen more times.

I’d also be remiss not to mention that the story, as of the time of writing, is unfinished. The central conflict around Zod doesn’t have a proper ending, with the final stage simply promising it will be continued. One update added an extra stage, so Zod should be coming along with another update eventually. That extra stage is actually one of the more inventive of the whole set, using familiar tropes from the rest of the stages in a new way. It functions more like a puzzle than an outright fight, and if stages like it had been mixed throughout all of Man of Steel, it would have done wonders for the pacing.