I just can't fathom his hesitation. Flying was the only thing Tiburon got right.

The industry has had it perfected for roughly five years now, or since the release of Spiderman 2. What I’m talking about is your controlled character’s ability to cross gigantic cityscapes quicker than you can say “parcheesi.” Quicker, I say, because you might stutter a couple of times.

I should have chosen a different word.

Surprisingly,  it got even better from there. Ultimate Spiderman succeeded Spiderman 2, and last year we were lucky enough to get both InFamous and Prototype; the closest we’ve been to flying in a game that was considered “acceptable” to most media outlets.

While the Spiderman franchise touted an excellent open world engine which mastered “fast travel” as you swung about like Peter Parker and all, you’d participate in the same missions hundreds of times over. Spiderman 2 and its subsequent releases started to feel like technology demos showing off an open world, but with next to no focus on long lasting gameplay. Aside from speed, you never really felt like a badass. No, it took until 2009 to let you… float.

The power of flight being, of course, the ultimate degree of showmanship.

If Cole slipped to the ground below, he himself would be fine. The pedestrians, however, would be flung through storefronts or into traffic due to Cole's forceful impact.

Cole, the main character from InFamous, and Alex, the lead from Prototype, were both afforded the luxury of extremely fast travel as long as either of them were in the air. Cole’s flight, however, was a means to bridge gaps he could not jump naturally, while Alex Mercer’s floating was an extremely intense substitute for riding in a car, a la the Grand Theft Auto series.

All methods of travel mentioned above are entirely competent systems which allow you to do what you want: make it from point A to point B in record time. What they don’t allow you to do, is maneuver fully in a 3D environment. Sure, you can go forward and down, but you can’t move backwards or up. Once you double jump, you were at the apex, and you could only go down from there.

Oops. Looks like I forgot about Superman Returns. That wasn’t that hard to do, unfortunately.

Superman Returns was a full-on 3rd person superhero flying simulator with heat vision.  It was little more than that though. While I was enamored with being Brandon Routh Clark Kent, the game fell into the unhappy mold that Spiderman 2 had left behind. In fact, it was damn near the same action figure, but with a swapped colour pallet.

The game was panned critically, but not because of the flight mechanisms, which were detailed as being fun, if not totally enjoyable. Truly, the only reason the title has a 51/100 aggregate score from Metacritic, is because Superman himself works properly. Perhaps a little underpowered, his controls were just fine, and just like Spiderman 2, zipping from one end of the city to the other was far more enjoyable than following the actual storyline. EA Tiburon could have called the game “Superman: The Side Quests,” because that is what the game truly was.

So you’ve gotten the controls right and established the user a sense of power, and that’s fantastic; but if your game is a near carbon copy of what hit store shelves years prior with all the same problems, it just doesn’t matter. I put roughly 4 hours into Superman Returns before I, pun intended, simply couldn’t return. To further validate that statement, I am one of the biggest DC fan boys in the district.

What works for Batsy, just wouldn't Supes.

All I’m begging for is a decent superhero game with the controls already exercised into shape by Tiburon, but with decent production values, a compelling story, and gameplay that might make you want to play it. Spiderman 2 raised the bar for superhero games in 2004, but it could be argued they sat on that until 2009 with acclaimed hits such as InFamous and Batman: Arkham Asylum.

One of the aspects that kept Arkham Asylum so grounded was that it was set mostly indoors. While Bruce Wayne is outfitted with the means of quick transportation from his various gadgets, vehicles, and parkour, not wasting valuable resources on recreating a digital Gotham means developer Rocksteady was able keep things more condensed and manageable.

What worked for Batman cannot work for Superman unless you took control of his alter ego, Clark Kent, in what would surely be the least enjoyable hero game of all time. Imagine Superman just reporting the scoops, instead of being the front page story himself– talk about brand misrepresentation. Superman’s powers and abilities just don’t allow him to be sat indoors, because the moment the gloves were off, half of the box store he was visiting would be in shambles.

Games evolve. Perhaps I’m asking too much to have the industry one-up itself again so soon, when it took them 5 years to do it the last time. Then again, therein lies your incentive. The demand for each and every person to make a name for themselves these days is so great that by now, someone should be jumping on the chance to make another Superman game, or at least change the dynamics of 2009′s styles.

Interactive entertainment is Bizarro's enemy.

Superhero games and movies are riding an all-time high right now and have surfed a wave of cash throughout this entire decade. The time for a near-perfect Superman game is now. Come on! Just buy yourselves rights to whatever engine InFamous used (people speculate that it was the same system used by Uncharted, but as of this moment, I see no hard proof of that)!

Superman will always be a popular franchise, and is arguably the most recognized and iconic figure in pop culture, but as of today, has had minimal success in film, and considerably less success in the gaming realm. It is possible that DC Universe online can remedy our plight, but waiting is the hardest part.

As much as we like Guns ‘n’ Roses here at Critical Gamer (you know, when Slash was doing his bits) we have to disagree with their view on the city when it comes to games. If games are anything to go by, the grass isn’t that green, if you can even find some, and whilst a few of the girls may be pretty, they seem to be lost in a sea of plain Janes and prostitutes.

Open world sandbox games seem to be coming in thick and fast since Grand Theft Auto highlighted the trend, more and more of the things seem to be set in cities filled of violence. Huge towering skyscrapers, packed roads full of taxis and every colour in the grey rainbow that you can imagine. Isn’t it all starting to get a bit dull?

Off the top of our massive collective head, we can think of at least eight million (citation needed) high profile games that have been set in some of the most bland concrete jungles set in fact and fiction. Three that were released recently(ish), Spiderman: Web of Shadows, Prototype and Grand Theft Auto IV are all guilty of being based in what seems to be a largely copied and pasted mass of tall buildings reaching skyward. Is it really necessary? A bit more variety would have been nice, especially when it comes to navigational landmarks; as maps just aren’t as fun.

Some games we will admit need the sprawling mass of thousand feet tall buildings. Spiderman for example, is not only cemented in New York City through decades of comics, but he needs it, as trying to swing around anywhere else such as London would not have provided him with the high altitude fast transit he is accustomed to. He’d have to take the tube like everyone else. This is excusable because it is made use of. It is actually essential to have tall things for webbing to latch on to. It certainly made it more plausible since the first Spiderman game on the PS2, where web could latch on to the clouds.

Mid air or mini city, you decide

Prototype being set on Manhattan Island is again, a bit more understandable. It is Alex Mercer’s playpen allowing him to run up walls, jump over buildings, glide over military bases and smash down to earth with enough force to destroy a tank. It would not have been nearly as successful if it was based in Birmingham, not just because of the relatively low skyline of the city, but can you imagine the sound of 1000 Brummy accents screaming in terror? The thought of it is enough to make your fingernails curl back on themselves.

So far the only passable excuse for basing yourself in a city, is that game characters can use the ridiculous architecture of the monolithic buildings to gain an advantage. Everything can be utilised and (potentially) not an inch is wasted. After all, if you had the power to climb up the side of a building in an instant, using it to get a higher vantage point or lose pursuers is a very good idea. What really tugs on our nads though is when there are massive dull looking buildings placed everywhere that can’t be interacted with at all, where the only point to them is as a decorative barrier for the player.

In our mind, Grand Theft Auto IV had already committed a cardinal sin visiting its parody of New York for the third time and not really adding a great deal. Yes there was a very impressive lick of paint by graphical standards, but a similar look could have been achieved by blowing up a series of cement mixers in a massive car park. Grand Theft Auto III had already done the whole living city thing the justice it deserved, and we do not feel that IV added sufficient to be that revolutionary. Oh yes, there are bin men and TV channels now, but not much that adds to the gameplay.

As if rush hour traffic wasn't already bad enough

The one thing that we cannot understand is that how so much of the city setting is wasted due to the limitations of the player. The only way to really interact with the skyline is to take a helicopter and land on a building, and even then there is not a great deal of point to it. Yes it looks impressive, but you can not really justify jumping off from a gameplay perspective. The best use of this so far has been the youtube videos of people base jumping into helicopter blades with hilarious consequences.

It would have been different if you could go inside most of these buildings, or even taken a lift to the top with something to do up there. Instead they just seem to stand there as criminally wasted space in a game with so much potential if only it didn’t take itself so seriously from a gameplay perspective.

Maybe targeting Grand Theft Auto so specifically is a bit harsh, but most games featuring a city with towers trying to pierce the clouds are all as guilty as each other. The setting is just starting to feel a tad overused now, as going by rows and rows of bricked up surfaces separated into uninspired, yet practical blocks of streets is not the best setting for engaging in escapism. It’s a bit like going out to an Indian restaurant and ordering porridge. Yes you’ve gone out for a nice experience, and maybe you really love porridge that much, but at the end of the day, it is still an incredible boring choice in a sea of potential marvel.

Just like a corridor, only outside

Burnout Paradise is a slightly different take on the sandbox city game, but faces similar flaws to GTA, only now you are permanently welded inside a car. The thing we love about the Burnout series is the feeling of set racing tracks within busy cities which created exhilarating thrills in dodging traffic at fast moving intersections and all that slow motion jazz. In all the games prior to Paradise, the roads would be full of cars and each track would take you through nice and unique scenery on a pre-determined path of fun, mayhem and carnage.

Paradise, taking place all in one city, meant that a lot of the time it felt incredibly samey, with all the races taking place within a city that you were free to roam around in and find your own route. This meant that the feeling of being funnelled in to heavy traffic was removed slightly, with more choices to avoid it and the other racers. The fact that you could explore all the ins and outs meant that the races started to feel a bit dull after a while.

Cities must be peppered with buildings at least this tall to qualify

The city thing has been done so much now it’s not even funny. GTA, True Crime, Mafia, The Godfather, Saints Row; we’re not saying these are bad games, but all have been set in a bustling city which shows how unoriginal it is to do now. How about just giving the city life a bit of a rest before doing it again? Commuting in real life is ball aching enough, so doing it again in a game, no matter how destructive the end result is, just feels a tad bit uninspired.

It would be nice to see more games get out of the city a bit more. We’re not talking about Grand Theft Auto: Shanty Towns or anything, but a bit more variety than packed city life, just not quite as mind bogglingly dull and open as 70% of San Andreas.

Perhaps the pursuit of realism is to blame for coma inducing, uninspired cityscapes becoming a bit too commonplace. Does this mean that we need some more creative minds in the games industry? Possibly. We just hope that the next GTA will be a bit more revolutionary than pretty graphics and an aiming system that took almost a decade to get right.