Summary
Though he may not have technically been DC’s first hero,Supermanis almost single-handedly responsible for kick-starting the entire superhero comic book genre, but despite his immense legacy and his continued popularity,Supermanstill hasn’t received a genuinely great video game adaptation. Over the last four decades, the Man of Steel has made a plethora of major video game appearances, but none have really captured the scale and grandiosity that the character commands.
While hits likeSuperman: Shadow of ApokolipsandThe Death and Return of Supermanexist, these games came out decades ago at this point, and even then, they very rarely made players truly feel like the Man of Steel. A fully-fledged open-world title is exactly what Superman deserves, but it’s gotten to the point where many fans have given up on this dream, believing a truly great Superman game to simply be too hard to make. But there’s one unlikely franchise that’s been proving for over a decade that a Superman game could still work.
Battlefield Proves That a Superman Game Could Work
Battlefield Features Some Astounding Destruction Physics
For years, many fans have written off the chances of gettinga AAA Superman gamedue to its perceived impossibility to develop, and one of the main arguments has always revolved around destruction physics. Though Superman always tries to keep his fights away from civilian life, his adversaries tend to have a penchant for destruction, often leading to the Man of Steel being thrown through skyscrapers, being smacked around by lampposts, and being hurled across gravel. So, naturally, fans would expect a fully-fledged, high-budget Superman game to include some state-of-the-art destruction physics, and theBattlefieldfranchise has been paving the way for over a decade now.
Beginning all the way back in 2008 withBattlefield: Bad Company, DICE began to experiment with cutting-edge destruction physics. In this first iteration,Bad Company’s destruction physicswould let players destroy walls and other pieces of scenery that players could use for cover. InBattlefield: Bad Company 2, DICE introduced “Destruction 2.0,” now allowing players to bring down entire buildings by destroying their structural supports.
ThoughBattlefield 3’s larger-scale mapsmeant thatBad Company 2’s high level of destruction needed to be toned down a bit for the sake of performance, it returned in full-force inBattlefield 4, where “Levolutions” were introduced. These Levolutions allowed players to drastically change the layout of a multiplayer map by performing specific tasks such as changing the pressure of underground pipes, destroying a dam, or setting explosions on a specific floor of a hotel, all of which result in major changes to the environment, such as blocking paths to certain objectives or flooding the map with water to stop in-play vehicles.
Battlefield Offers a Perfect Blueprint for a Superman Game
Obviously, there are a lot of features that would go into creating the ideal Superman game, butBattlefield’s destruction physics do offer the perfect blueprint for a major Superman video game element. It would be great to seeBattlefield 4’s Levolution mechanicbe used in a Superman game, with some key event being triggered when Superman is thrown through a building, and the map changing drastically as a result. To avoidMan of Steelcriticisms, a core accompanying gameplay feature of these destruction physics could be the need to rescue civilians affected by the damage, all while continuing to fight off whatever otherworldly villain is causing the chaos, thus capturing the spirit of Superman more so than any game that’s come before it.
DC
DC is a brand of superhero comics, television shows, movies, video games, merchandise, and more. The company owns the rights to popular characters like Batman, The Suicide Squad, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, and many more.
