Okay, let's just get this out of the way right off the bat: I've been reading DC comics pretty much my entire life, so I'll get out into the weeds a fair bit here. If you get a few lines into a paragraph and wonder what in the blue hell I'm going on about, feel free to skip down to the next one.
This is officially the most screwed Superman has ever been. Each of these guys-- Darkseid, Luthor, Henshaw (Cyborg Superman), Solaris, Brainiac, Zod, Bizarro, Mongol, and Doomsday-- has taken him to the brink of destruction multiple times, and one of them actually did kill him at one point! Solaris, the tyrant sun from the distant future, has eradicated many of Superman's descendants. This one feels much more lopsided than the other puzzles in this series! (Also, I just love how Superman is so epic that one of his nemeses is literally an evil star!) I would have liked to have less of a "boys' club" feel to things, though. Superman doesn't have a ton of villains who are women, but surely Silver Banshee or Livewire could have been added to the chaos! Both have great designs that would have livened things up even more.
Superman is in his second Rebirth-era costume here, used for a brief period before reverting to his classic look. After DC's weird years-long obsession with banishing the red trunks, this was the design that finally achieved the right balance of colors to where he didn't look significantly off without them. So naturally, they ditched the look almost immediately! I was a little annoyed by this at the time, so it's nice to see that design used here, though it does date the puzzle's design a bit.
I'm also not a fan of how artists continue designing intricate armor for Darkseid, though I do understand that instinct. The problem is that distinctive armor is completely counter to what the character is all about at his core; Jack Kirby created him as a sort of ur-fascist, of whom every tyrant that has ever been is but a pale shade. Darkseid's pursuit of the Anti-Life equation reflects his obsession with eradicating individuality throughout the multiverse, creating a reality where all is one with Darkseid. Kirby dressed him accordingly in very bland, simple clothing. Nearly every redesign has fundamentally missed this crucial aspect of the character, giving him the look of a generic alien conqueror, rather than the immortal enemy of all that lives. Sorry for the rant, this is just one of those things that annoys me every time someone gets it into their head to redesign him.
Personal preferences about costume choice aside, the art is well done, with nice composition and a sense of energy. The linework is strong, and the colors are an appropriate mix of bright and muted tones that rarely become too dark or murky. Areas such as Darkseid and Doomsday's bodies, where light sources cast highlights that alter the colors from their normal ones, are different enough from one another that it's usually clear which of those areas each piece belongs in. One of the trickiest areas was actually the blue parts of Superman's uniform. The mix of varying shades of blue and black shadowed areas made it less easy that it appears at a glance. The toughest section was Darkseid, by a wide margin. The ambient lighting altering the appearance of every texture, overall darkness of large parts of it, and sheer size of that area led me to leave it for last. Thank Grodd for the Omega Beams bisecting that region of the puzzle, as they served as an anchor point and made that section considerably less tedious than it would have been without it!
The quality is exactly what you'd expect from Ravensburger in recent years. The pieces feel nice and fit together well, though slightly loose. Tons of dust, with some coming off the pieces even after two rounds of sifting. As with the Flash puzzle I did several months ago, DC or Ravensburger made the unfortunate decision to leave the artist uncredited, and I can't find this information online.
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