Review: Incredible Hulk

Fighting/Smashing/Getting Angry

Hulk Gash!

I’d like to say that this game is the greatest Hulk game ever made, and that it shits all over that crappy Iron Man game.

I’d like to say that it’s better that Hulk: Ultimate destruction, (a game that, in my opinion, is still one of the greatest comic book games out there and well deserving of a 9/10 score)

I’d like to say that even though this is a comic book game based on a movie, it isn’t a lazy, rushed, buggy mess that Marvel are firing out copy after copy after copy of, with big fat dollar signs sparkling in their eyes.

I’d like to say all these things… but I cant. The truth is its the same old mediocre, lackluster effort we always get with this kind of thing.

Anyone with half a brain knows the golden rule of video games… nine out of ten times, any video game based on a movie is going to suck. They’re half-arsed, lazy attempts at a cash-in and games based on comic book movies are usually even worse.

It’s always been a bit of a puzzler for me why these games are so bad, because usually comic book games are thoroughly enjoyable, fun games with a lot of love, attention to detail and replayability (except for the Superman games… which were mostly (read: completely) all shit).

So why, when it comes to making a game based on an upcoming movie, do the big names in the business always get so damn lazy and think that we’ll accept crappy, half-arsed, shite like Superman Returns and those boring Spiderman PS2 games that weren’t even half as good as the first one on the PlayStation. Because they’re greedy bastards who don’t care about anything but money, of course.

Ok. So… The Incredible Hulk on the 360…

So this is basically Hulk: Ultimate Destruction with a re-skin job, which would be half decent if it wasn’t for a few things.

1) No more wall-running. Now you just get really clunky climbing that isn’t half as fun to pull off and nowhere near as smooth and exciting to move around the city with.

2) A pitiful selection of unlockable moves. No catching rockets in mid-flight, no swinging tanks through the air, no jumping onto moving helicopters. Its like they looked at the gameplay from Ultimate Destruction and said, “Ok… how can we suck all the fun out of this?

3) Toned-down super moves that don’t do as much damage and now have tiny areas of effect. Seriously. what the Christ happened? I could take down all the tanks and helicopters nearby with a well-timed supermove in Ultimate Destruction. Now I’m lucky if I manage to completely destroy a couple of army jeeps right in front of me with a fully upgraded thunderclap.

4) Crappy unlockable costumes including a red Hulk that you cant get outside of the US, because it’s only unlockable by buying the game from GameStop and a Hulkbuster costume you don’t get unless you’ve already bought Iron Man (fuck you Marvel. You’re actually using The Hulk to sell more numbers of another shitty, underdeveloped movie tie-in. Fuck Ironman and fuck this game for not giving me the chance to finally beat the shit out of him and his shitty little Hulkbuster armour. Instead putting me against a dull unpainted prototype that the army uses against you).

Jason Secondary Review I would like to preface this review by saying that i have a fairly limited knowledge of comic book lore. That said i did know a little about the Incredible Hulk before booting up the game on my PC. What i couldn’t figure out was why the game kept crashing and looked like a PS2 port! It was a bad start. The 360 version proved to be much more accomodating and the first few minutes of the game where quite impressive. The combat was simplistic but, as with most games in the superhero sub-genre, the player starts off with a limited move set and your reward for progress in the story are better and more powerful moves. This was my second mistake with the Hulk. There are some new moves acquired throughout the game, I unlocked about about five while playing through the storyline. This was a bit disappointing because the game is focused solely on combat and the lack of attacks makes it rather dull. The voice acting in the game is delivered with zero passion and when playing as the Hulk he emits no sounds. Not a grunt while fighting, no witty one liners. Nothing. I would expect that a character that’s as old as the Hulk to have a little collection of sound bites but no. One for the fans only. Secondary Score: 5/10

So basically what you’ve got is an extremely toned down, boring version of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, with a new storyline that kinda sorta follows the story of the movie, but doesn’t really since nothing that happens in the game is even close to what goes on in the film apart from the fight at the university and the fight with Abomination, which wouldn’t be that bad except for the fact that all the voice acting, other than the stuff from the cut-scenes, is horrifically shit and anything taken directly from the movie sounds like its been recorded by someone standing at the back of a cinema with a tape recorder.

I would really love to say this game is amazing, but the fact is, it isn’t. It is boring to play, the bosses are really crappy and after you’ve fought one, you’ve fought them all, the graphics are un-ashamedly average to the point of looking like something from an old PS2 game (there’s even unlockable art in the game that shows you the before and after screenshots of the pictures they used to advertise the game, all touched up in Photoshop to make people think the game was going to look much, much better than it really was. A fucking horrible case of false advertising and I’m thoroughly ashamed that any company can still get away with something like that, in this day and age).

So in conclusion, Hulk is a crappy, sub-standard, bastardization of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction that’s been ported over to the 360 then ripped of everything that made it fun to play in the first place. I hate Edge of reality for managing to ruin one of the greatest comic book games of all time. I hate Sega for letting this lazy, piece of shit game get released, but most of all I fucking hate Marvel for being ok with shitty games like this being made, because they know lots of ten year olds will run out and buy it after watching the movie.

I’m off to fire up my PS2 and play a real comic book game (Superman Returns, obviously).

Rating:

3/10