In what is sure to come as a surprise to gamers everywhere, the latest in a long line of movie to game adaptations is, in fact, terrible. While I am in no way a connoisseur of the Man of Steel or his intricate canon, I can tell you that if you consider yourself a fan of Kal-El, stay far, far away from this portable travesty. If you’re still reading this in the misguided hope that there is at least some small redeeming sliver of quality in this steaming pile of digital feces, allow me to crush your dreams.

You start your game by choosing a difficulty level and from one of nine versions of Superman. Not knowing much of these different adaptations I can’t say the option gave me the tingling feelings they might a more dedicated fan. The game opens with you piloting your Krytpon spaceship back to earth. The controls lack the option for traditional inverted flight controls, but after a few moments of frustration I was able to begin my campaign to save Metropolis from the nefarious schemes of Lex Luthor and other super villains.

The city is broken down into a board game style grid, where Superman and his Nemeses battle for real estate. Each turn starts with stamina points which you spend in various amounts traversing across the grid. Once you land on an event or villain space the game loads one of an array of missions or boss battles. While this is where the fun should start, it brings nothing but pain, with the occasional gnashing of teeth.

Missions are the most basic of mini-games involving time limited flights through obstacle courses or countless romps through a barren Metropolis in simple and repetitive fetch quests. These range from discovering androids posing as law abiding citizens to sequences pulled from the film. There are a handful of variations, but you’ll have experienced them all within the first hour of playing.

Boss battles somehow succeed in turning something as awesome as a one and one duel between Superman and his universe’s many villains into a thoughtless and mind numbing rhythm game. You read that right. Instead of actually fighting bosses you watch Superman trade blows as your performance in the fight is matched by your ability to press buttons in time. It’s like DDR for your thumbs without the music or the fun.

After each round the health of Metropolis is calculated based on the number of spaces Superman and the villains hold and how successful you were at completing the mission or boss battle. If Metropolis loses too much health it’s game over. The different difficulty settings do nothing more than decrease the time limit in which you must get to work at the Daily Planet or other missions and the rate at which you must press buttons during boss battles.

To top this all off, there are constant loading screens between missions. Loading screens on a DS game are inexcusable to begin with, but these set a new level in both frequency and duration. You might think someone secretly swapped your DS for a PSP.

The graphics are a mix of 3D and cel-shading, which works well given the material. However Metropolis seems like a ghost town with its only inhabitants related specifically to the mission at hand. Occasional popup and fog abound. It’s not the ugliest DS game, but it’s not that pretty either.

Kryptonite... For Your DS
This game is another example of sloppy game design and hurried development in an attempt to cash in on a big time franchise. There is really nothing redeeming about this game and you'd be best served to ignore it completely.

-- Weston Bass