The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction
Posted September 23, 2005
Last summer, Activision
released Spider-Man 2: The Movie, yanking the superhero genre out of the linear,
level-by-level rut and dropping it into a free-roaming, open-ended, Grand
Theft Auto-style sandbox. Although developer Treyarch nailed the exhilaration of swinging around Manhattan at
breakneck speeds, the end result felt as if they spent too much time on the gameplay and not enough on the game. With The
Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the developer's sophomore outing with the jade giant, Radical Entertainment has
incorporated everything that was great about Spider-Man 2 and fixed nearly everything that wasn't.
Gameplay:
The game's story was penned by Paul Jenkins, who fans of the comic should remember from his run on the book several years ago. And yeah, there is a plot: Bruce Banner feels a darker side of the Hulk emerging and turns to his gamma-irradiated pal Doc Samson for a solution. Banner isn't just struggling with his internal demons -- Emil Blonsky has seemingly unlimited military resources at his disposal to bring down the Hulk, and Blonsky's gradual transformation into his own green, impossibly strong abomination fuels his thirst for revenge.
The story's mostly forgettable, though; like it says after the colon in the title, this game is about ultimate destruction. (Oh, and yes, you play as the Hulk for the entire length of the game. No puny Banner levels.) Most of the game is set in two places -- a sprawling metropolitan city or a sleepy desert town in the Badlands. Two very different locales with one fundamental thing in common: you can trash almost every square inch of 'em. The Hulk's massive leaps leave enormous craters in the streets and buildings. He can yank a car off the ground, rip it in half, and use 'em like brass knuckles. The Hulk can flatten a truck and use it as a makeshift shield or toss it like a boomerang. He can grab a boulder and roll it like a multiton bowling ball. Nearly everything can be picked up or ripped out of the ground, then smashed, thrown, flung, or used as a blunt weapon...and yes, that includes people.
With that much power at your fingertips, the controls would have to be pretty complicated, right? Ultimate Destruction opens with a quick tutorial, and...yeah, there's an instruction manual shoved inside the game's case. You really don't need 'em, though. The gameplay is unbelievably intuitive; this is the type of game where you can pick up a controller cold and have everything figured out on your own in a minute or two. Even running up walls or clawing up a skyscraper feels effortless. New moves can be acquired as the Hulk successfully completes missions and amasses a stockpile of Smash Points, and the controls to pull those off aren't any more complicated. There are no cumbersome, arcane strings of button combinations to commit to memory -- even with dozens and dozens of moves potentially at his disposal, nothing the Hulk does requires the use of more than two buttons. That means less time to think...more time to smash.
There are a couple dozen story missions in total, most of which boil down to smashing something, protecting something, or moving something from one point to another. There are too many tanks, soldiers, policemen, helicopters, and heavily-armored Hulkbusters to contend with to fret about repetition; even on "easy" mode, Ultimate Destruction is hardly a
cakewalk, especially during the epic brawls with characters like The Abomination, Mercy, and Mecha-General Ross. Gamers
looking for a break -- or just some more Smash Points -- can take on any of the scores of challenge missions scattered
throughout the levels. There's a much greater variety of these missions than in Spider-Man 2, and although some of
them are pretty standard -- racing, rescue as many people as possible, smash, defend -- the best ones show off the Hulk's
athletic skills. He can kick field goals, surf, hang-glide, juggle, and play his own destructive versions of golf, baseball,
soccer, kick the can, and hammer toss...and no, this isn't exactly regulation equipment. If you get tired of either flavor
of mission, just run around and wreak havoc. Actually, running around is exactly what I had the most fun doing -- holding
down the right trigger, darting through the city, careening through everything in my path, and watching cars and buses
frantically swerve out of the way. Like the Grand Theft Auto series, the more damage you do, the more force the good
guys will use to try to take you down.
Its shortcomings are all pretty tolerable. I would've preferred an autosave as I finished each mission; fumbling through the menu interface and confirming that...yes, I do want to overwrite my current save is a little annoying. There's also a fair amount of repetition in the missions, although there's enough else to do that the game doesn't drag. I don't think I would've complained if there were a more varied and larger set of environments either. Don't let that stop you, though. The gameplay's perfect, the side missions are ridiculously fun, there are tons of unlockables, and the concept of letting the Hulk run amuck through a couple of cities is brilliant. The game is so heavily polished that it's clear that Radical Entertainment set out to make the best superhero game in existence, and I think they may have succeeded.
Graphics:
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is both a free-roaming game and a
multiplatform release, so it comes as little surprise that the graphics aren't overwhelmingly impressive. The game runs in
high-definition if you have a 720p-capable television and the Xbox's component video pack, although the difference isn't
that staggering, and really chaotic moments cause the framerate to sputter. Jaws won't drop at a glance, but the size
and sheer interactivity of the environments more than make up for the somewhat simplistic models. The Hulk himself is nicely
detailed, and although he often doesn't take up much real estate on screen, that smaller size shows off the scale of his
destructive power and the enormity of the forces opposing him. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction doesn't make
use of all of the power under the Xbox's hood, but there are enough nice graphical touches throughout the game that the
visuals are anything but a disappointment.
Audio:
The directionality of the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio makes it almost as easy to locate the Hulk's enemies as the game's useful HUD, and with the megaton explosions, crumbling buildings, and the Hulk's quarter-mile leaps, my subwoofer rumbled almost non-stop. Neal McDonough, who voiced Bruce Banner in the animated Hulk series in the mid '90s, contributes his vocal talents to this game and is joined by his Boomtown co-star Donnie Wahlberg. Some of the other voice talent involved with the game includes comedian Dave Thomas, Richard Moll, and Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman. The sound effects and orchestral score are also particularly well-done. A really fantastic job all around.
Conclusion:
Great gameplay with (gasp!) a great game to match, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction very well may be a contender for the best superhero video game out there. At the very least, this is an essential rental. Highly Recommended.
released Spider-Man 2: The Movie, yanking the superhero genre out of the linear,
level-by-level rut and dropping it into a free-roaming, open-ended, Grand
Theft Auto-style sandbox. Although developer Treyarch nailed the exhilaration of swinging around Manhattan at
breakneck speeds, the end result felt as if they spent too much time on the gameplay and not enough on the game. With The
Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the developer's sophomore outing with the jade giant, Radical Entertainment has
incorporated everything that was great about Spider-Man 2 and fixed nearly everything that wasn't.Gameplay:
The game's story was penned by Paul Jenkins, who fans of the comic should remember from his run on the book several years ago. And yeah, there is a plot: Bruce Banner feels a darker side of the Hulk emerging and turns to his gamma-irradiated pal Doc Samson for a solution. Banner isn't just struggling with his internal demons -- Emil Blonsky has seemingly unlimited military resources at his disposal to bring down the Hulk, and Blonsky's gradual transformation into his own green, impossibly strong abomination fuels his thirst for revenge.
The story's mostly forgettable, though; like it says after the colon in the title, this game is about ultimate destruction. (Oh, and yes, you play as the Hulk for the entire length of the game. No puny Banner levels.) Most of the game is set in two places -- a sprawling metropolitan city or a sleepy desert town in the Badlands. Two very different locales with one fundamental thing in common: you can trash almost every square inch of 'em. The Hulk's massive leaps leave enormous craters in the streets and buildings. He can yank a car off the ground, rip it in half, and use 'em like brass knuckles. The Hulk can flatten a truck and use it as a makeshift shield or toss it like a boomerang. He can grab a boulder and roll it like a multiton bowling ball. Nearly everything can be picked up or ripped out of the ground, then smashed, thrown, flung, or used as a blunt weapon...and yes, that includes people.
With that much power at your fingertips, the controls would have to be pretty complicated, right? Ultimate Destruction opens with a quick tutorial, and...yeah, there's an instruction manual shoved inside the game's case. You really don't need 'em, though. The gameplay is unbelievably intuitive; this is the type of game where you can pick up a controller cold and have everything figured out on your own in a minute or two. Even running up walls or clawing up a skyscraper feels effortless. New moves can be acquired as the Hulk successfully completes missions and amasses a stockpile of Smash Points, and the controls to pull those off aren't any more complicated. There are no cumbersome, arcane strings of button combinations to commit to memory -- even with dozens and dozens of moves potentially at his disposal, nothing the Hulk does requires the use of more than two buttons. That means less time to think...more time to smash.
There are a couple dozen story missions in total, most of which boil down to smashing something, protecting something, or moving something from one point to another. There are too many tanks, soldiers, policemen, helicopters, and heavily-armored Hulkbusters to contend with to fret about repetition; even on "easy" mode, Ultimate Destruction is hardly a
cakewalk, especially during the epic brawls with characters like The Abomination, Mercy, and Mecha-General Ross. Gamers
looking for a break -- or just some more Smash Points -- can take on any of the scores of challenge missions scattered
throughout the levels. There's a much greater variety of these missions than in Spider-Man 2, and although some of
them are pretty standard -- racing, rescue as many people as possible, smash, defend -- the best ones show off the Hulk's
athletic skills. He can kick field goals, surf, hang-glide, juggle, and play his own destructive versions of golf, baseball,
soccer, kick the can, and hammer toss...and no, this isn't exactly regulation equipment. If you get tired of either flavor
of mission, just run around and wreak havoc. Actually, running around is exactly what I had the most fun doing -- holding
down the right trigger, darting through the city, careening through everything in my path, and watching cars and buses
frantically swerve out of the way. Like the Grand Theft Auto series, the more damage you do, the more force the good
guys will use to try to take you down.
Its shortcomings are all pretty tolerable. I would've preferred an autosave as I finished each mission; fumbling through the menu interface and confirming that...yes, I do want to overwrite my current save is a little annoying. There's also a fair amount of repetition in the missions, although there's enough else to do that the game doesn't drag. I don't think I would've complained if there were a more varied and larger set of environments either. Don't let that stop you, though. The gameplay's perfect, the side missions are ridiculously fun, there are tons of unlockables, and the concept of letting the Hulk run amuck through a couple of cities is brilliant. The game is so heavily polished that it's clear that Radical Entertainment set out to make the best superhero game in existence, and I think they may have succeeded.
Graphics:
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is both a free-roaming game and a
multiplatform release, so it comes as little surprise that the graphics aren't overwhelmingly impressive. The game runs in
high-definition if you have a 720p-capable television and the Xbox's component video pack, although the difference isn't
that staggering, and really chaotic moments cause the framerate to sputter. Jaws won't drop at a glance, but the size
and sheer interactivity of the environments more than make up for the somewhat simplistic models. The Hulk himself is nicely
detailed, and although he often doesn't take up much real estate on screen, that smaller size shows off the scale of his
destructive power and the enormity of the forces opposing him. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction doesn't make
use of all of the power under the Xbox's hood, but there are enough nice graphical touches throughout the game that the
visuals are anything but a disappointment.Audio:
The directionality of the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio makes it almost as easy to locate the Hulk's enemies as the game's useful HUD, and with the megaton explosions, crumbling buildings, and the Hulk's quarter-mile leaps, my subwoofer rumbled almost non-stop. Neal McDonough, who voiced Bruce Banner in the animated Hulk series in the mid '90s, contributes his vocal talents to this game and is joined by his Boomtown co-star Donnie Wahlberg. Some of the other voice talent involved with the game includes comedian Dave Thomas, Richard Moll, and Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman. The sound effects and orchestral score are also particularly well-done. A really fantastic job all around.
Conclusion:
Great gameplay with (gasp!) a great game to match, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction very well may be a contender for the best superhero video game out there. At the very least, this is an essential rental. Highly Recommended.