DC's greatest heroes are finally making the leap from straight action games to RPG. With this and Activision's Marvel: Ultimate Alliance lumbering into UK stores in late 2006, it looks like a belatedly bumper year for sprawling super-hero titles.

The story follows DC's big seven as they tackle multiple, seemingly unrelated threats. As things progress, however, it becomes apparent that Brainiac has been pulling some strings and more is afoot than we've been told. For those who aren't sure, ... more >>

DC's greatest heroes are finally making the leap from straight action games to RPG. With this and Activision's Marvel: Ultimate Alliance lumbering into UK stores in late 2006, it looks like a belatedly bumper year for sprawling super-hero titles.

The story follows DC's big seven as they tackle multiple, seemingly unrelated threats. As things progress, however, it becomes apparent that Brainiac has been pulling some strings and more is afoot than we've been told. For those who aren't sure, playing as the big seven will put you in control of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter and Zatanna. Each has their own set of distinct powers (with developers assuring us that they aren't being lazy about it, and each character's abilities custom programmed, with no clones) meaning that teamwork will be a prevalent and necessary element of the game.

There's obviously a bit of common ground between this and Ultimate Alliance: both games are RPGs and feature the respective company's big guns. That said, there looks to be a fair amount of difference between the two. One is the cast size, with Justice League starting out with a relatively modest seven characters (although more are unlockable as you progress) compared to the 20 or so in Ultimate Alliance. That seems to make sense, really. The DC heroes probably average around double the amount of powers (or applications of powers) of their Marvel counterparts and there's only so much you can get to grips with in a given game. Similarly, Heroes only allows two players co-op as opposed to Alliance's four. The developers claim this is to minimise the amount of chaos on screen at any given time, and who can blame them? There's only so many people you can watch moving at light speed and throwing around buildings at any one time, isn't there?. Another major difference is the use of flight. Whilst Alliance does feature characters with the power of flight, the game doesn't look to make full use of the feature. Heroes, by comparison, allows the flying characters far more more manoeuvrability, with the option to swat villains like flies using anything you find lying around (like, oh, I dunno, cars).

The basic message here is that it's a good time to enjoy super-hero games. We're off to put our y-fronts back on the inside of our trousers now... << less