You don't have to be a cynical or jaded gamer to know that a big-screen blockbuster = obligatory videogame tie-in, it's been the par for the course since E.T. stunk up the Atari 2600 back in the day. You do have to be a little cynical and jaded to assume that every videogame tie-in for a popular film will suck, however, although its not difficult to sympathise with this view. It seems to be particularly true for movies based on comic-book franchises, which seem to fare much worse than the average cross-promotional crud. So it was with some scepticism that people eyed Superman Returns, the EA developed and published game of the film with the same name, with a healthy degree of suspicion.

Not to overdo a point already well made, but if we look one level deeper, Superman seems to suffer even more than his other heroic hombres when it comes to the videogame translation. Superman: The Man of Steel on the original Xbox received a lukewarm reception at best, and Superman 64 is widely regarded as one of the worst games on the Nintendo 64. Ever. So at the very least, you've got to give EA credit for being willing to welcome this leprous black sheep into the fold, and trying to give it an extreme makeover. The results aren't quite the fairytale you might hope for, but Superman Returns is definitely one of the better games the Man of Steel has featured in...for what that's worth, anyway.

Superman Returns is based on the recent film by Bryan Singer, which aims to reinvent the series that was made famous by the late and great Christopher Reeve. The movie did huge business and received critical praise, yet for some reason the game simply didn't materialise at the time. Eventually it was released with much less fanfare to coincide with the DVD release of the film, which is probably for the best given how little the game actually has to do with the movie. You see, for all its good points, Superman Returns wasn't exactly an action movie, and some of the key scenes of excitement in the film simply wouldn't have been enough to flesh out an entire videogame.

As such, Superman Returns is less a movie tie-in and more an awkward attempt to apologise for a decade of really bad Superman videogames. In this way it's actually quite successful, because while it isn't perfect, it certainly shows that a good Superman game is actually a possibility. One of the biggest problems developers have faced is that Superman is essentially an invincible, super-powerful badass, which makes playing him sort of like playing the game with Cheat Mode always on. To EA's credit, they've managed to find a way to make Superman less, well, super, by tethering the successful protection of Metropolis city to winning the game. Sure, Superman can be invulnerable and go around kicking butt with all his super-powers, but it isn't much use if the city he calls home and the people he cares for end up charred and broken, is it? As such, it is Metropolis's health that you've got to keep an eye on if you don't want it to be game over, but it doesn't stop there.

While Superman is a force to be reckoned with, like everyone else he needs to stop and recharge the batteries if he wants to stay in fighting form. For most us this means a hot shower, milo and cornflakes and several cups of coffee as the day goes by, but for Superman this means flying close to the sun and getting some solar soothing. Thankfully this doesn't translate literally in the game, rather it simply means Superman's stamina will deplete when he uses his super-powers or takes a pounding from enemies. Seeing Superman crumple to the ground exhausted isn't particularly heroic, but it does a good job of ensuring you can't spam your super-powers to excess.

Speaking of super-powers, Kal-El has a few Kryptonian specials available to him. He flies, obviously, but he also has freeze breath, heat-vision, and gale-force breath, the latter being particularly useless. In fact, Superman's powers really feel like a bit of an afterthought – freeze breath can extinguish fires and some enemies are only vulnerable to heat or cold, but other than that, there's very little to distinguish these super abilities. Which means the emphasis is placed on melee combat, and while Superman has a good variety of combos and moves, the implementation of hand-to-hand combat is awkward at best, and isn't satisfying in any way.

If combat is a chore, then advancing the game is positively onerous in comparison. Taking a leaf out of Treyarch's infinitely superior Spider-man 2, you'll be required to complete set tasks and objectives before the story will advance. But unlike Spider-man 2 that made this a fun and varied experience, Superman Returns simply forces you to engage in random battles or put out the odd fire to gain experience points. Get enough and Superman will level-up and maybe learn a new move or improve his skills and stamina, and it will then trigger the next sequence. There's nothing at all cohesive about this, and towards the end of the game the amount of random encounters you need to slog through before a boss battle get to be frustratingly high.

The silver-ish lining here is that some of the boss-battles are pretty cool. Since you won't be fighting Lex Luthor at all, old favourites from the super-villain stables have been trotted out to serve as your foes. Expect to see the likes of Metallo, Bizarro and Mongul, and fighting a giant Metallo as he tries to level Metropolis is probably the highlight of the game. There's also a few mini-games to keep you occupied if the travails of random battles wear you down: Mr Mxyzptlk is on hand to challenge you to race around the city, or he can turn you into Bizarro and force you to destroy as much as possible. There's also 100 kittens hidden around the city that require rescuing. How cute.

But even with these distractions and an inordinate amount of boring battles, Superman Returns is without a doubt one of the shortest and easiest games on Xbox 360 to date. The game can easily be completed in less than 4 hours without breaking a sweat, and the only reason to hang around is for the Achievement points. And while there's a lot of Gamerscore whores out there (your esteemed author included), it takes a special kind of desperate to want to play this game for 12 hours simply to unlock a 30-point Achievement. Naturally the game comes with the ‘next-gen' $119.95c RRP that EA loves so much, and this makes the brevity of the experience all the more offensive

Superman Returns is at least a decent looking game, although being a cross-platform port of a game designed for the positively ancient Playstation 2, it definitely comes up short compared to most recent games. Up close, pretty much everything lacks fine detail aside from Superman himself, and the draw-distance – while quite good – isn't brilliant and you will encounter some pop-in as you hoon through the skies of Metropolis. Which is half the problem really; a huge, 80-mile square virtual sandbox is great, but when its devoid of any life or anything interesting, it's really just a colossal waste of space. Metropolis could be half the size and you'd never notice, except that the game would be even shorter.

On the audio front things aren't much better. Granted the big-name cast are on hand to voice their characters – Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey, Parker Posey and Kate Bosworth are all present and accounted for – they're given so little to work with that they might as well have just employed the cleaning crew at the office to do the honours. Kate Bosworth in particular has about 2-3 lines total, and if you're going to pay the big bucks to get Brandon Routh in, you could at least give him enough random comments to prevent the repetition from driving people insane as they play the game. The music is functional but utterly unremarkable, and the sound effects do the job but are likewise fairly forgettable. Sadly, this is a pretty apt analogy for the Superman Returns videogame experience.