SUPERMAN: SHADOW OF APOKOLIPS
Original Release: Atari, 2002, PlayStation 2
Other Releases: Gamecube (2003)
Based on the late 90s Superman cartoon, Shadow of Apokolips features great cel-shaded characters amidst a sometimes plain backdrop and action gameplay that was middling even for the time it was released
Superman: Shadow of Apokolips (PS2, Atari, 2002)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Superman has a notorious, almost cursed, video game history. It's still not entirely clear why no one could ever come up with a really good Superman game, but part of it might be that the character is just too powerful; it's a real effort to come up with contrivances to present him with legitimate lethal challenges to pad out the full length of a proper game.
Whatever the case, Shadow of Apokolips actually navigates that pitfall pretty well - it puts the Mang of Steel up against his godlike rival Darkseid, who provides advanced technology from the planet Apokolips to fuel a Lex Luthor-headed army of robots that can actually put a dent in ol' Clark. With his heat vision and ice breath and all that not particularly effective against these metal machines, Superman is down to brawling in Double Dragon style with thrown crates and pipes and all sorts of fun beat-em-up stuff more suited to a wrestling deathmatch.
So I do class it as a beat-em-up, even though it's kinda a genre mix. It has something of an open world feel despite having linear levels, since you're often free to toodle around Metropolis. But it's small, using good ol' invisible walls to look larger than the relative postage stamp you're allowed access to, and I never really found anything to do there (I mean, how are you gonna power up Superman?). You do spend most of the game basically punching it out with robots and using The Warriors improvised street weapons on them, though.
That part is middling, but when it strays from that core formula it's just foul. You get an early taste of that in the tutorial level, which concludes by having you follow a pilot who is apparently Liquid Snake around Metropolis and try to knock his helicopter out of the air with your "Speeding Bullet" dash. The control for just flying around and hovering is fine, but target lock basically doesn't work at all and trying to eyeball a moving target that's taking evasive action behind buildings and skillfully using its blades as a shield to knock Supes to the ground (how does that even make sense?) is just maddening.
Persist and you get to the first beat-em-up level which is just OK; a little sloppy, and the enemies are none too impressive in their intelligence or self-preservation instincts. It goes off the rails again at points where it starts experimenting with other game mechanics, though. There's a contrived stealth level in LexLabs that's pretty awful, since the loose game engine was not at all optimized for this sort of thing, and once in a while there are escort / protect civilians elements that are frustrating for the usual reasons.
By far the best quality of the game is its cel-shaded art, honestly one of the best applications of this technique I've seen. The game was a license of the Superman: The Animated Series cartoon that ran from 1996 to 2000, I think technically an extension of it as this was released a bit after it ended. A lot of effort was put into emulating the cartoon's art style, to great effect; some background details and bit-player NPCs could use some work, but the main characters and set-pieces are very well done and appealing.
Though it's mediocre at best outside of its art, Shadow of Apokolips nevertheless often tops people's lists of the best Superman games ever, which is much more an indictment of the canon than it is reflective of this game's quality. It was mostly competent for its time (almost 25 years ago now) as a basic action game but unacceptable now, the story is "whatever" and the material its based on was about the most bland and kid-focused take on the property short of the original comic run. And once you complete the 10 or so levels there's not much left to do with it.
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