Superman: The Megaton Rainfall Solution

For many years, I have been looking for a good Superman game with no success. The problem has always been: How do you portray an invincible God in a satisfying way without lessening his power?  The movie-tie-in for Superman Returns brought with it an interesting idea, in that the Man of Steel himself was invincible, but the city he was protecting was not. This idea was taken and incorporated into one of my favourite games of last year, Megaton Rainfall.

In Megaton, you play as an invincible superhuman gifted with cosmic power. You are tasked with protecting the entire planet from invading alien forces, and are given some pretty devastating power to do so. The caveat? It’s game over if the world takes too much damage, which is all too easy when your secondary fire is effectively a nuke. The world is a big place too, so you can fly at incredible, stupid speeds to get from place to place.

Pentadimensional Games have done an incredible job at creating not only our world, with monuments and cities spread out in roughly the correct place, but also with other planets, other solar systems and other galaxies. The game gives you flight faster-than-light speed, and encourages you to just go explore its universe. To compensate being able to fly faster than light while on a planet, the game changes your speed depending on where you are automatically.

Not really relevant, but I love how this game looks in space...

This is all well and good, but Megaton could do with being a lot smaller. I think that, if you took the same ideas that Pentadimensional Games have shown and scale them back, so you patrol one city, one country or even just one world, the game could be so much better. There are a few extra things that would let you do, too.

Firstly, you add in more air control. Flying is a fundamental game mechanic and while it functions perfectly well, it could always be better. I think just incorporating a rotation ability would make the flying instantly much more manageable. Then, remove the automatically varying speeds and limit it to just two to toggle between, a default speed perfect for moving quickly through the heavy metropolis and a faster supersonic speed. The former would probably be slightly slower than Megaton’s current slowest speed.

I also think the powers could be a little more varied. The aforementioned secondary fire nuke is all but useless in actually saving people, and the telekenetic power is problematic to use effectively. The latter can be fixed by making it a single input, so holding right click will prepare the object you’re holding to be thrown. The former probably just doesn’t need to be in the game at all, and I would rather have a more physically capable hero - one who can punch through enemies at least - than a city destroying nuke.

From there, you have the basis for a good Superman game. Slap a villain - not Lex Luthor, pick someone else - on there, and let the hero work begin!