Highlights
- The rise of superhero movies, starting with Iron Man in 2008, has led to a saturation of superhero content in both film and video games.
- Some superhero games, like Viewtiful Joe , and The Wonderful 101 , have been praised for their unique takes on the genre and fun gameplay mechanics.
- Other non-comic-based games, such as Freedom Force and City of Heroes , have also offered players the opportunity to create and play as their own superheroes in immersive gaming experiences.
It used to be an event just to see one movie about Superman or Batman every few years. Then more superheroes like Blade, Spider-Man, X-Men, The Punisher, Daredevil, etc., all got movies. People already thought there were too many superhero flicks by 2007. Then Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 and people have been buried in spandex ever since.
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They made their mark in video games too. Marvel Vs Capcom, Batman: Arkham Asylum, PS1 Spider-Man, and more are all fondly remembered and played. But not every company has deals with Marvel, DC, or Image. They had to make superhero games that weren’t based on comics.
10 Comix Zone
Made in-house by Sega, Comix Zone went meta with its story. Gen X rocker and comic artist Sketch Turner is working on his latest issue of “Comix Zone” when lightning strikes the page, bringing its villain Mortus to the real world. With his new powers, he sends Sketch into the comic to get him out of his way towards global domination.
Aided by the comic’s Resistance general Alissa Cyan, Sketch has to brawl his way through different comic panel-based levels to get back to reality and beat Mortus. It’s a fun game, though it was criticized for its controls and high difficulty. Being a Genesis game in 1995 didn’t do it favors with the PS1 around either. But it’s an underrated game, which is thankfully easy to find via Sega’s retro-game compilations.
9 Viewtiful Joe
Funnily enough, most of what was said about Comix Zone could apply to Viewtiful Joe. Only instead of a 1990s guy fighting in a comic, it’s a 2000s tokusatsu fan called Joe entering the movie world to save his girlfriend Sylvia. With the aid of old hero Captain Blue, he gets to "henshin" into his Viewtiful form, which can use the movie reel to his advantage.
He can speed up or slow down the footage to get around foes or obstacles, zoom in for precise movement, and hero pose to access more powerful strikes. The controls were more refined than Comix Zone, though, like that game, it could get quite difficult. Still, it's a fun and inventive action game that could do with a modern re-release.
8 The Wonderful 101
After working on Devil May Cry 1, the Viewtiful Joe games, and Okami, Hideki Kamiya left Capcom to co-found Platinum Studios. There he made his own spiritual successor to DMC with Bayonetta, before making one for Viewtiful Joe in The Wonderful 101. To save the world from the GEATHJERK aliens, the player controls a whole mass of Joe-like heroes. They can attack all together, and use their Unite powers to take the form of giant weapons.
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Players could draw a circle for a fist, a straight line for a sword, a wavy line for a whip, etc., on the Wii U gamepad to create their forms and, with enough meters, switch between them for combos. It was a curious but fun game that liked to break the 4th wall, referring to old games, Platinum Studios, and Kamiya himself. Which feels ironic now that Kamiya has left the company for new ventures.
7 Mega Man
Viewtiful Joe and The Wonderful 101 don’t play like each other, let alone like Mega Man with his weapon shooting & swapping gameplay. Though it wouldn’t be surprising if Kamiya had the Blue Bomber in mind when making either with the same chibi proportions and heroic goals. Then again, Mega Man took inspiration from other superheroes too.
Its story of a robot boy saving the Earth from threats with the help of a kindly scientist, promoting peace between people and robots, is the same as the classic manga hero Astro Boy. But to do this, he was converted from a house robot to a fighting one, similar to how Casshern's Tetsuya became a cyborg to fight evil robots. He even had a robot dog sidekick called Friender, who’d inspire Mega Man’s pup Rush and his other animal buddies.
6 Freedom Force
Irrational Games skipped the tokusatsu and manga in favor of superheroes’ 1940s comic book roots for their 2002 real-time tactical RPG Freedom Force. It starts with a battle between Mentor and the evil Lord Dominion. Mentor’s ship explodes and showers Patriot City in “Energy X”, a special substance that can grant people superpowers based on their personality.
It’s up to Mentor to unite as many new heroes as he can to help protect the city from Lord Dominion’s forces and stop him once and for all. The game was quite highly praised at the time of its release, and it gained a Nazi-bashing sequel in Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich. But the series has laid dormant since 2005, kept alive by a Steam release and plenty of mods.
5 City of Heroes
Here’s an old favorite. City of Heroes by Cryptic Studios was an MMORPG that lets players create their own defenders of justice. After picking out their powers from a wide selection, it was their duty to seek out the gangs and criminal organizations lurking in the underbelly of Paragon City or on the appropriately named Rogue Isles. Players could take on missions solo or form Supergroups with other players, complete with their own bases.
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Supergroups could even link up with others to form bigger Coalitions. That’s putting aside its multiple updates, including one where players could become supervillains instead. Sadly, the game’s servers were shut down in 2012, but some fans have managed to keep the game going with their own servers. It’s more fiddly, but it's kept the game alive today.
4 Overwatch 2
The original Overwatch was so successful it was practically a craze back in 2016. It was like Team Fortress 2 for a new generation. Then Overwatch 2 came out and brought about even more characters and lore for the series, with each Hero featuring a grand power to make them stand out among the rest.
It was essentially a superhero-based first-person shooter. It was just more like SHIELD than the Justice League, as the titular organization worked as a strike team for the UN against terrorist threats. But it had the bright colors, quirky designs, and optimistic outlook of old-school heroes, with Tracer and D.Va becoming particularly popular characters.
3 Crackdown
Crackdown
- Platform(s)
- Xbox 360
- Released
- February 20, 2007
- Developer(s)
- Realtime Worlds
- Genre(s)
- Action-Adventure
Grand Theft Auto 3 has since overshadowed its two predecessors by bringing its mayhem into 3D. It not only worked but spawned a league of imitators. Then series co-creator David Jones and his new company Realtime Worlds wondered where they could go next. The answer was simple in retrospect: add superpowers to the firepower.
Crackdown was one of the first superhero-based open-world games. Players could still do the whole GTA thing by driving, shooting, doing side activities, etc. But the lead character, the Agent, could also climb up buildings, race across rooftops, and chuck cars at foes too. They could also collect orbs to level up their stats, so long as they didn’t attack innocents or fellow peacekeepers. Otherwise, their EXP gains would be temporarily reduced as punishment.
2 Prototype
When Marvel’s Spider-Man came out, it was entertaining enough just swooping around Manhattan and taking in the sights. Even so, Insomniac wasn’t the only developer able to map the Big Apple for consoles. Radical Entertainment managed it all the way back in 2009 with Prototype. Except its hero, Alex Mercer plays more like Venom.
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He uses his amorphous, shape-shifting powers to stop the spread of the Blacklight virus across the city. He ran up buildings instead of swinging from them and could form all sorts of weapons from hammering fists to sharp claws. The difference is that Prototype’s NYC is a very brown & gray place than Spidey’s vibrant metropolis. It was the style at the time.
1 inFAMOUS
Prototype also had bad timing, or Sucker Punch’s inFAMOUS did, as both games came out roughly at the same time in 2009, and had similar premises where their moody hero had to overcome a government conspiracy and stop a deadly plague. That said, there were a few key differences. inFAMOUS used a mix of in-game graphics and comic book-like panels for its cutscenes.
Its lead, Cole MacGrath, gains his electric powers in an explosion like the Hulk, and they only appear because he has special genes like the X-Men. Then players could develop Cole’s abilities in different ways depending on whether they wanted to be good or bad. It’s essentially a superhero game, but it’s just as easy to become a supervillain in it too.