Superman Returns: The Video Game - Metropolis

For Superman Returns: The Video Game, it was important for the developers to create a completely free-roaming environment, and to make it available to the player from the very beginning of the game. When you're dealing with a character who can fly hundreds of miles per hour, puting up invisible barriers around the city just wouldn't work. For the first time ever, players will get to experience the entire layout of the city of Metropolis, and all from a bird's eye view.

However, when building a virtual playground that encompasses 80 square miles of free-roaming territory, it's important that the player be able to quickly and easily find their way around. There's a lot of Metropolis to get lost in. To help players determine their location relative to the rest of the city, Metropolis has been broken up into several districts. The districts include places like the News District, with it's towering GNN building, a tech-heavy Hyper Sector, and even mythos-specific locations like Suicide Slums, which even features a local watering hole most comic fans will immediately recognize - The Ace of Clubs. Each sector of the city features it's own unique color pallettes and architectural styles. Within the greater whole, there's literally a Metropolis for everyone's preferred style, and more of it than ever before.

It's one thing to enjoy all this detail at street level, but when your'e talking about a Superman game, we need to look to the sky. From running along the streets like any third person city game, you can seamlessly transition into flight and go places no game has gone before. Metropolis was designed to be experienced vertically. EA developed new proprietary world-building software to create a Metropolis tailored to the Man of Steel. In addition to helping them differentiate sectors of the city, the world-builder can even give them a heroe's-eye view of the city so they can essentially carve flight paths into the city skyline. Even the heights of buildings are tailored to giving the player a smooth flying experience, which you're going to be thankful for when you're rocketing around at super-speeds. In addition, the team didn't stop designing at ground level. In Metropolis, civilization claws it's way skyward, with advertisements, sky-bridges, and railways sprinkled at all levels - there's even air traffic!

Keep checking back to SupermanBooth.blogspot.com in the coming weeks for more exclusive first looks at Superman Returns: The Video Game, due in stores June 28th.