A repetitive beat-em-up that's only worth playing for its place in the history of mediocre Superman games.
Many will complain at the fact that you only control the real Superman across three levels, but this is actually a good idea for two reasons: a) It loosely follows the story of the DC comic book the game is based on, and b) It allows players to fight as different characters, breaking up the monotony of the game.
Sadly, the execution of such a simple idea is undermined by characters that are way too similar to each other. Instead of the characters having truly different abilities, their attacks are merely rearranged for each hero. For example, grabbing an opponent and slamming them to the ground with Steel requires you to press forward and the attack button, while the same slam is done backwards for Superman. Only the animation changes, but the result of the move is exactly the same. The blasts each character can pull off all look different, and all do the same meager damage.
Yet it wouldn't be too bad of a hit for gameplay if all the moves you could pull off had a significant purpose and were well polished. However, unlike in similar titles such as Final Fight, it isn't smart to just try and complete the attackx4 combo on enemies, as they'll usually counter. With the inability to change your position in the Z axis when you jump, landing flying attacks against enemies that are always moving up and down is also ineffective. As a result, if you want to actually finish the game, you'll be forced to stick with trying to grab enemies and throw them against other enemies, or against walls for possible powerups. Essentially, this will be your modus operandi for the entire game, making the gameplay tiring and repetitive the deeper you get in the game. Thankfully, there are only 10 levels (no save feature, and apparently infinite Continues), but towards the end the type of enemies and level layouts and art get so repetitive, it'll take a completest and patient Superman fan to finish the whole game.
At least the game is relatively pretty, with characters having bright colors and the backgrounds, bland as they may be, avoid looking ugly. The soundtrack is, like the main theme of the game, in need of variation, as well as the forgettable sound effects.
Death and Return of Superman doesn't do anything significantly interesting for the beat-em-up genre, and in fact misses some of the elements that make the genre interesting in the first place, such as vibrant and varied backgrounds, fundamentally different characters to choose from and polished gameplay. The story is just an exaggeratedly dumbed-down version of the comics, although that's to be expected of this type of game. Storyline always takes a backseat in the genre, and the fact that it was released for the SNEs in '94 means it was pre-story driven games that weren't just RPGs. What's sad is, this is probably one of the best Superman games available to this day.