A few years ago, I reviewed The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the original Xbox. It was a very good game, giving Hulk fans the ability to execute all sorts of powerful moves and combos and destroy tons of stuff across desert and urban environments. With the release of The Incredible Hulk in theaters, their was no doubt that there would be a video game to go along with it. Typically, movie based games are pretty bad, but I had higher expectations for this particular title. While I wasn't completely disappointed, The Incredible Hulk was not the next step from Ultimate Destruction that I was hoping for.

Hulk Smash! Constantly!

The most important point about The Incredible Hulk video game is that there just isn't a whole heck of a lot to it. In saying that, I mean that you can play for a couple of hours, play through several missions, and you'll have already repeated what the entire game encompasses. After a brief intro mission in a factory, you end up in Manhattan, the idea being to protect the city from four evil scientists and their individual armies. It doesn't help though, that the US Army is also breathing down your neck and should you start to cause any trouble in the city by destroying things, you will have to deal with a Strike Team. Not destroying things in the city should be an Achievement in itself, it's very difficult to keep yourself from, uh, “accidentally” picking up a bus and launching it down the street a few blocks or pummeling a building until it falls. Furthermore, even when you're intending on just defeating the enemy, you cannot help but take a lot of the block with you. Sure, it's fun to smash things with Hulk, and you can view all kinds of statistics in the Pause Menu about how much you have destroyed, but it's an odd counter to what you are actually supposed to be doing in Manhattan.

The Incredible Hulk is one of those open world third person action games that we've seen with GTA, Crackdown, Spider-Man 3, and several other titles over the past few years. You are free to roam and do as you please but you will need to use your map to locate missions in the game world to attend to if you want to advance the story. For those who have played Hulk - Ultimate Destruction, this is very familiar territory. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but as with Ultimate Destruction, eventually this gets old, be it in a few hours or several hours. Edge of Reality did spice things up a little bit with the addition of collectibles and in game achievements (like defeating so many Strike Teams, etc.) that unlock artwork or new combos. They took a Crackdown approach with placing a couple of types of collectibles all around Manhattan, hidden for determined gamers to find, and for me that adds a little more value but not really enough to get passed the repetitious missions and combat.

Heard That

The actors for the film signed on and lent their voices for their respective characters for the video game, and that's a nice touch. Other effects in the game are fine, with plenty of NPC chatter, mostly screams, and of course, the sounds of destruction. Visually, The Incredible Hulk is a mixed bag of some good textures and animations in part, but also coupled with a lot of technical glitches that will leave you scratching your head. On the one hand, The Hulk up close looks pretty awesome, ripped with muscles and the movement of his body as he breathes looks good. Plenty of other graphical details you might take for granted, especially viewing distance when you're airborne or high up looking down at the city, are largely absent or glitchy.