I am firmly in the camp that you can make a good game with Superman as far as pure gameplay goes. Super-powered beings are hardly a rarity in the videogames and you can take it pretty far while remaining fun if you do it right. Prototype is a good example of a game where you are basically a god. I know not everyone likes that game and it's certainly not perfect, but it allowed you to be seriously superpowered while still giving you enemies that can give you a hard time, especially on higher difficulties. The same can be done with Superman, especially if they decide to ease the player in by starting him off as superboy or something and limiting his abilities.
The problem lies more in capturing his character. The Batman games are not just successful because they are good games, but they capture the quintessencial aspects of Batman and let the player experience them. This includes everything from the main mechanics of movement, stealth, and combat to really minor things like using detective mode to solve a crime or even things like not killing criminals. The puzzles Rocksteady gives us may be brainless and even absurd if you think about how they were set up logistically, but Batman is a detective, so you have to give him shit to figure out, end of story.
How do you do that with superman? Superman is the archtypical superhero in the sense that he is inherently good and tries to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. How do you prevent the player from using his heat vision or super strength on squishy humans? Or how do you not just crash through a building when the player orders him to? You can simply have him not able to do those things, but that'd be immersion breaking in a way batman wasn't. You could have him be on some other planet, where things enemies and environment is open to destruction, but taking superman out of metropolis would be robbing the player from the quintessential superman experience, as well as potentially not letting him interact with some of the characters like Perry, Jim, and Lois and whatever the other Metropolis denizens are. And even if you do take them out of the picture, you need to have superman actually saving people. He's not like Batman who does his work in the dark and distant from people when possible. Superman is right up front, saving them whenever he gets the chance, and not just physically, but he tries to give them advice when they have emotional problems too.
For a successful superman game in the same vain as Batman, they'd need to think around the problems that would have Superman acting unsuperman-like and how to make the problems that superman deals with playable.
