Superman 64 Review

The pitch is an open Metropolis you can cross at speed, and on this hardware in 1999 that pitch is never going to close. What arrives instead is a virtual Metropolis, a plot device whose entire job is to excuse an empty city, and a loop of timed rings you fly through before the game will let anything else happen. The green haze sold as kryptonite fog is a draw distance of a few dozen feet given a story reason, and dressing that limit up as a Luthor scheme is genuinely resourceful work.

Underneath it the flight controls swing wide and correct late, so threading a ring tests your patience with the camera rather than your skill. The errands between the ring stages, carrying objects and shoving enemies into position, are worse than the rings. License restrictions do real damage: Superman may not strike people or wreck property, which removes most of what a Superman power fantasy is made of and leaves chores.

The ambition is genuine, and the level list still shows the city the team wanted to build. Nothing on the cartridge comes close to reaching it. Titus ships regardless, and the result becomes the measuring stick every later licensed failure gets held against.