It seems like the pros and cons on this one are now a lot more apparent to me than they were a year ago. There is at least a discernable amount of effort here, what with seemingly five different spritesheets for playable Supermen and two entirely different OSTs for their respective versions. There's also a solid attempt at retelling the story from the comics here. It clearly is at least a little more than some sleazy cash grab, although that is a pretty low bar to cross.

Unfortunately, in following the story as closely as it does there's a lot of returning to previous places with minimal palette or layout changes, and alongside the enemies it creates this outright unacceptable lack of variety that makes the game ultimately a lot worse. I'm not an expert on the hardware, so I don't know if they didn't have enough memory or what, but surely there was still some mixing up to be done despite returning to places. Consider Metallic Madness Zone from Sonic CD for a moment, how the look of the first two acts hardly resemble each other, yet it still feels like the same location and additionally adds a feeling of progressing deeper into the lair. Here, you wander the same street on Metropolis maybe three different times, the same destroyed road on Coast City, you fight Hank Henshaw three times (including as the final boss), etc. I really feel like there is more to work with here than what was delivered, and my guess is either time constraints, memory constraints, or ineptitude at Blizzard Entertainment has been prevalent since its baby years. Probably all three.

Have I mentioned this is ten levels long? As a beatemup? Why is there this obscene amount of padding when they seemingly didn't have enough ideas remaining by just the halfway point? What are you doing?