Occasionally, after watching a good superhero movie, I get a hankering to go play a game in the same vein. That happened with James Gunn’s Superman this weekend, but as I got home and dug through my catalog, I realized there really wasn’t anything I could play that captures the same spirit as the film — both in terms of tone and theme, or even gameplay stylings. Despite Superman’s status as one of the most iconic characters of all time, most of his forays into the world of gaming have been middling or disastrous. And digging even deeper, it’s astonishing how bad DC, in general, has capitalized on modern gaming over the last decade. A whole universe of worlds and characters that feel tailor-made for video games — but Superman, more than anything, should have had his definitive game long ago.
Superman has a long list of his own video games, from the notorious Superman 64 to the ambitious but flawed Superman Returns. But he’s never had something truly defining. And that’s genuinely a shame, as the idea of a Superman game, on paper, sounds like just as much of a smash hit as Marvel’s Spider-Man or Batman: Arkham Asylum.
