My buddy Jon has gone to work at Electronic Arts, and has arranged for me to get some games to review on here – thanks Jon! The first one that came through was Superman Returns on PS2, and here are a few brief thoughts, alongside an FMV trailer.

I’m not gonna give you the story – it’s not relevant, really – the game has a Spidey 2 / GTA style free-roaming, choose your own mission feel, involving any number of Metallo-bots and other baddies. Sometimes asteroids. And you’re Superman. That’s all you really need to know.

Gameplay-wise, its kind of fun to fly around as a Superhero, but the cool and relatively straightforward control scheme falls down when you start to get bored from having to deal with incredibly repetitive baddies and disaster scenarios. Whilst the end-of-stage bosses present something more of a challenge and novelty, this is a game that will involved a large amount of button mashing.

Sound – is fine. Nothing to complain about or sing about here, really. Not a game that needs a lot of atmosphere.

Graphics – show off the PS2’s decrepitude as a console. There are no textures, and about 7 polygons. Kind of reminds of me of ‘Alone in the Dark’. Anyone remember that? If you don’t… video follows. I hope its better on the other consoles.

Overall: I’d give this game about a 3. It’s not great, has some novelty value, but even superhero wannabes like myself will lose patience with the repetitive action and poor graphics. And if, like me, you’ve recently come into possession of an Xbox 360, you’ll probably want to play Gears of War for a while yet…

EA does have a bunch of very cool games in development: Hellgate London and Army of Two to name two… hopefully I’ll get a preview of these soon and will write about them here.

Huh – who’d have thunk. My blog has actual content on it. Big up!