The Man of Steel has certainly endured a rocky road in gaming, with some smattering offerings here and there. The computer games tried some variety, and to be fair, they were acceptable offerings for the medium. The Commodore 64 Superman experimented some different perspectives and play styles. Kemco Superman on the NES was...more on that another time. I've talked about Superman on the Atari 2600, it wasn't bad for what it was. Now it's the 16-bit era, so how about a side-scrolling beat'em up based on one of the more polarizing Superman stories of the early 90's?

If anyone thought elements of the Silver Age were still lingering, the 90's was a period that officially put that nail in the coffin. A clean-cut, whitebread superhero like the last son of Krypton just wasn't captivating the imagination of comic book readers like he did decades ago, and the darker, edgier 1990's were more fascinated with serious stories involving Batman and Dark Horse's The Mask. DC and some authors figured it'd be a great idea to kill Superman off in a multi-arc storyline leading to his return. It was met with very mixed reception, many seeing it as a shameless publicity stunt. Uhhh, yeah. They're in the business of pushing sales, what do people want?

The Death and Return of Superman, developed by Blizzard and released on the SNES and Mega Drive in 1993, abridges aspects of the comic with Superman and Doomsday finishing each other off, Clark falling with the final blow. The story then picks up with the four imposter Supermans, Eradicator, The Man of Steel, Cyborg Superman, and Superboy, appearing and defending cities in their own manner, it skips over the heroes and Lois Lane mourning his death. 

The artwork, done by the Blizzard team of Sam Didier (who still works with Blizzard Entertainment as of this writing), David Berggren, Roman Kenney, Joeyray Hall, Ronald Millar Sr., and Stuart Rose, is absolutely great, the pixel images during cut scenes look like they're lifted right from a comic panel. It's too bad there isn't a lot of them, many images are repeated and leaves little to be desired for the progressive story, the same way Captain America and The Avengers work. 

In-game, the sprites look huge and have quality animation. While I don't think there's a wide variety of enemies to face against, it's generally two variations of medium and small-sized foes, mixed with some flying enemies in the later ground-based stages. I'm not sure what the name for this game's engine, the animation appears vaguely similar to Blackthorne.

The likenesses for the four Superman dopplegangers are great, and while the properties of their attacks are essentially the same, they each have their unique animations for combo chains, throws, screen-clearing specials, and projectiles.

The graphical differences between the Super Nintendo and Genesis versions are a little minor, but the SNES one has more detail and polish. So this is a thing during this time period that developers did regularly. I'm a fan of parallax scrolling, it's always pleasing, generally because it's a minor detail that adds more visual depth that you may not recognize unless you're paying attention. I get sick of programmers who were way too happy with foreground obstructions in games to the point where it just becomes SHIT IN MY WAY. Death and Return of Superman is the visual equivalent of littering. There is so much garbage in front of the characters, in front of the general walking and play area, it starts getting annoying. Might be a nitpick, but this is a blemish on an otherwise great-looking game. the backgrounds can also be demolished by throwing enemies into them, which is fun to do, reminds me of Konami's SNES Batman Returns.

Gameplay, there's not a whole lot to say in terms of ingenuity to the genre. It's a side-scrolling beat'em up where Superman punches and throws machines and gangsters around. I was curious about how integrated Supes' powers would be in the gameplay, the Man of Steel has many key abilities. For all the possible skills that could've been used, and given the button mapping capabilities of the Super Nintendo, it comes off a little disappointing that the offense is so linear, or you don't face many armor-breaking baddies you'd have to smash through.

For occasional stages, it breaks up the monotony with some brief flying stages and turns into a SHMUP. It controls well, not long enough to really derive much from in terms of gameplay. Just kinda there, really, but I appreciate the method of using the other Supermen. Eradicator and Cyborg fire beams from their hands, alright, that makes sense. I may have to check some sources, but I don't think Superboy launched projectiles. The one stage near the end involves Man of Steel flying inside Cyborg Superman's ship, which is lined with kryptonite, and it's the one airborne stage that slows the pace down. The problem is, Man of Steel is a very large target, has a relatively small attack window, and the only enemies that fly toward you are tiny and move pretty erratically. I ended up dying a thousand times trying to get past this, just to smash a face at the end with a mallet. 

The Death and Return of Superman is overall a pretty average superhero brawling game. Among its other weaknesses is a pretty paltry score, the music is not that impressive. The perk of playing as four different Supermanses is a neat gimmick, it's too bad that a) it's only a one player game, so it can get pretty monotonous, and b) the difficulty can get very intense, and with ten stages, might wear out its welcome. There's quality horsepower behind what's a visual treat of a game, if you can deal with the incredibly aggressive A.I., some fun can be had.