The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Action games seldom need much of a premise for big explosions and wanton destruction, and the latest Hulk game wears the action badge proudly on its sleeve.

Action games seldom need much of a premise for big explosions and wanton destruction, and the latest Hulk game wears the action badge proudly on its sleeve. With no impending movie to ride on the back of, its encouraging to see that developer Radical Entertainment has put the emphasis on a fun gaming experience rather than trying to exploit a loose movie tie in – ahem, Fantastic 4 anyone?

As the name implies, the emphasis is on destruction and Hulk: UD doesn’t disappoint. Just about everything in the environment is capable of being crushed, wielded or thrown. Explosions are satisfyingly meaty and cars burst into flames at the mere sight of the big guy’s tightly stretched pants.

The game borrows heavily from the GTA series – from the freeform, choose-a-mission style gameplay to the threat alert system that deploys more aggressive military hardware as the hulk becomes more rowdy. The GTA imitation is a refreshing change from the typical level by level beat-em-up progression which normally accompanies console action games. Once you tire of running up the side of buildings and throwing burning debris at screaming civilians in freeform mode, you can either progress through the sequential story missions or indulge in some point scoring, challenge missions.

Challenge missions present you with a variety of obscure yet fun tasks such as seeing how far you can travel without touching the ground, or how many cars you can stack atop one of the tallest buildings in the city. Though they’re fun, the reward is the same every time – extra Smash Points to spend on ability upgrades – which decreases the incentive to complete them all.

Story missions are straight forward and generally require you to perform some objective while a Panzer division tries to ream Hulk with a plethora of projectiles. As you progress you learn of Bruce Banner’s attempts to pacify his inner Hulk, though seeing as you never actually control Bruce, it’s hard to give a damn about whatever he’s having a cry about.

The only problems with the game occur when your objective isn’t to break everything in sight. As in most action games, precision jumping isn’t exactly easy and sometimes coordinating camera control can make things a bit haphazard.

Thankfully, the Hulk isn’t exactly a precision fellow, so this isn’t really that serious a problem. Repetition though is a problem, as it is with almost all action games. The challenge missions add some variety but once you’ve tired of running around breaking things there’s not a lot left.

If you were disappointed by Hulk’s first Xbox outing, this is a vast improvement. It’s a carstomping, civilian-screaming good time – just don’t expect it to last forever.