The Incredible Hulk, the follow-up to the superb Ultimate Destruction in 2005, is a mixture of fun city destroying, rampant technical problems, and irritating missions. Players truly feel as if they are the Hulk as they destroy New York piece by piece, and mercifully, the player is never forced to play as his lesser alter ego Bruce Banner. Unfortunately, many of the actual quests are dull and lifeless.
The opening level is the only one in which players are on a linear path toward their goal of wiping out enemies. From there, you’re dropped into a free roaming New York city. Apparently, the city is having the worst fog since Silent Hill making distance views from tall building a hideous mess of gray blobs. The same goes for street level gameplay in which cars and textures pop in only a few feet in front of the player.
Combat is standard beat-em-up fare. Hulk can snag objects and use them as weapons, including poles, destroyed vehicles, or even people. The small move set available to him is sufficient enough to defeat most foes, although repetition quickly builds in any extended game session. Certain fights require one specific move to take down an enemy, furthering feelings of repetition.
Other missions run the gamut from timed runs to destroy objects, video game mainstay escort ridiculousness bring the game to a halt, or simply battling a set number of randomly spawning enemies until their extinguished. In-between, weak animated cinematics are filled with dull voice acting. Other plot points are presented against a cheap static screen that do nothing to represent the film the game is based on.
Navigating the city offers some fun exploration in the vein of Crackdown. Power-ups are hidden in random places and require some clever maneuvering to find. Hulk can be a clumsy character to control, especially when in full jumping mode. Scaling buildings is easy, as is causing rampant destruction. Simply walking through certain objects is enough to send them crashing to the ground. Since the army increases their efforts to kill the Hulk as the urban renewal grows, accidentally running over something and being penalized for it isn’t particularly fair.
Major glitches never seem to stop piling up. Hulk can apparently fly as he’ll be become stuck in mid-air during free falls. Having the game crash is a far too common occurrence, locking up the hardware completely. Clipping is constant, and the frame rate tends to dip at random times. This was undoubtedly rushed to coincide with the movie release.
Fans looking for a sequel to Ultimate Destruction are going to be sorely disappointed. While it maintains the style and open world aspects, this is a different engine and separate developer. There is something to offer to fans of character here, including the epic (if visually lacking) destruction and familiar faces from the comics that expand on the film’s roster. How long you’ll stick around to see all it has to offer depends on your patience for lock ups and sloppy, rushed coding.
2/5
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