I downloaded the demo for Superman Returns off the Live Marketplace last night, which took a while since it weighs in at over 900MB. If you know nothing about this game then you are in for a real treat like I was.

The demo will take you about 10 or 15 minutes to play through and limits you to the 4 smaller islands of Metropolis, but it really is worth checking out. You are playing as Superman so you obviously get to fly around the city, and I have to say that I am really impressed with the flying mechanism in this game. It works very well and only took a minute or two to get the hang of. You can fly at normal speeds or super fast speeds and towards the end of the demo I found myself flying super fast at street level, dodging cars, people, and buildings without a problem. There is just something inherently cool about flying around a city. I think if I was a superhero flying would definitely need to be one of my powers.

The action/combat was slick with a way to lock on and a very easy way to switch between your super powers. This made disposing of the handfull of enemies pretty trivial.

Metropolis is 80 square miles of area to explore and works a lot like the Spider-Man games in that it is task driven. You go around and perform various tasks around the city. The demo was a little on the linear side, which could be expected. One of the really neat features is the map feature. Hit the back button and you get a 3D top down view of the city. You can pan around and even zoom in. It felt like some sort of Google application while using it, yeah, it was that cool.

If you are a big DC Comic geek or just love the Man of Steel, you should totally check out this demo. For something that hadn’t even popped up on my radar, Superman Returns is now on my short list of titles I can’t wait to get. This is good news since it was released yesterday.