Have you played Megaton Rainfall? Seems like a perfect Superman game.
AT LEAST A YEAR AFTER RECEIVING THIS ASK I HAVE NOW PLAYED MEGATON RAINFALL.
Been meaning to get to it for years, finally downloaded it the other night and knocked it out pretty quickly. As a game, while limited in its versatility, itās a blast and a jaw-dropper in the scale of its technical achievement. As a Superman-lite experience specifically, itās enlightening.
The basic idea here is that youāre a being imbued with titanic power by a godlike entity in order to protect the Earth from an alien invasion; while youāre virtually indestructible and your abilities are more than sufficient for the task, youāre just as capable of annihilating the fully-destructible cities as the invaders, meaning youāll have to choose and deploy your attacks carefully. Not only do you have a solid offensive bench, but your flight allows you to move far beyond any given city, or even the entire Earth, through a titanic procedurally-generated universe - as you fly out of Earth orbit you move faster and faster, blitzing past planets and solar systems until you find yourself in a chasm between galaxies, with every star and surrounding world technically explorable (even if thereās very little to find, with what little is of note generally marked). You can take breaks between the handful of missions ducking and weaving through Saturnās rings, claustrophobically submerging yourself in a gas giant, or tempting fate by flying up to a black hole.
Though there are a small handful of markers scattered through those galaxies, the real reason theyāre there is simply *to be there*, because as this essentially omnipotent character and the scale of the story are defined he should be able to go there and itās thrilling to do so. Itās one of the handful of elements of Superman it really captures, that sense of boundless physical freedom, in sharp contrast with the split-second decision-making anxiety that comes with the mission to protect humankind. And that thereās nothing out there is what makes said life worth defending: our protagonist, like Superman, can see firsthand that the universe while grand is in large part cold and empty, making the need to defend what life there is within it palpable.
That being said, once you get to the business of defending the differences are starkly apparent. Your character is inevitably going to kill a lot of people in the process of saving the world: while itās technically possible to avoid doing so, itās takes incredible skill and luck, while for Superman itās a standard. Youāre a blunt instrument to his scalpel. You can stop time for a bit, but in general your reflexes hardly match your speed as his do, with a human area-of-awareness rather than super-senses, and lumbering energy blasts with wide areas of effect rather than precise lightspeed heat vision beams. Itās no coincidence that the one ability technically geared specifically towards defending people is the last you unlock, and the moral priorities you ultimately serve in what story there is are ultimately far afield of anything traditionally superheroic. None of those are flaws unto themselves (the controls are kinda jerky, but I suspect thatās deliberate and I got more and more used to it over time), or even especially as a pseudo-Superman experience given itās so clearly its own thing where it counts. But itās worth acknowledging that this is at least as useful for demonstrating what Superman isnāt.
While thereās little in the way of replayability unless youāre a score attack junkie, this is absolutely worth picking up, stretching itself and the hardware in ways no AAA release would. The last mission in particular is one of the most spectacular Iāve ever played, an incredible realization of the promise of the scale and also easily the most Superman-ey chunk in both scope and your goals as the player. At least check out a Youtube playthrough.
