The Incredible Hulk Review

BY Mazamil Majeed | POSTED: 23 July 2008

The Green is not worth your green.



Like every other super-hero, or otherwise anti-hero, movie to come out in recent times, it has, at some point, been complimented with its own game. Not to say it is a bad thing but they ultimately drop down because of low production value and boring or undesirable gameplay. The Incredible Hulk is no different. The game is the official ‘playthrough’ of the anticipated summer movie, The Incredible Hulk. That said it is not a complete representation of the movie.

The story follows nothing from the movie other than the opening and the conclusion. The story missions are mostly to do with destruction and protection. During the game the Hulk saves Rick Jones from the Enclave soldiers. The rest of the game is to protect him from point A to point B, while he is on your back or in some vehicle. Several other characters appear like Mr. Blue, the U-Foes, Emil Blonsky and Thunderbolt Ross.

Like the movie the game is based in New York. It is modeled as New York City with the additions of some Marvel real estate. The whole game is not just story missions. It includes a lot of free roaming too, which for most of its part is pretty much fun but repetitive. In free roaming the Hulk explores New York while collecting power-ups and completing challenging mini-games. The hulk can sprint, wall jump and hyper jump to reach high spaces. Feats, which unlock special moves, are much easily obtained while free roaming and fighting a large number of AI soldiers.

The game incorporates a threat level system ranging from zero to a maximum of nine. Once the Hulk starts creating a mess of the city the ground troops are called. No big problem for Hulk. One punch and they’re gone. Then comes the Humvees with a machine gun followed by Military Choppers, tanks, and finally Hulkbuster armors. These may seem to be a lot of enemies ranging from the weakest to the strongest but they are not difficult to beat. Once achieved, the Hulk can regain full health by spending rage meter points. The more the Hulk destroys the faster the rage meter fills up. To lose the heat the Hulk uses the subway system. Once he is on other the other side the threat level comes down to zero. This makes the game pretty easy even on a difficult setting.

The main treat of the game is the destruction. The Hulk can destroy anything and everything in its path. Any building in the city can be destroyed. The hulk just punches or uses the moves it has unlocked to bring down a building. Smaller buildings are easy to destroy while attracting less heat while the larger building take some time and is a little more difficult as the heat keeps on growing. It is fun to see the destruction but it is brought down by graphical bugs.

From the top of a Skyscraper the Hulk the can view the whole of New York City. But the draw distance is bad. The buildings which can be seen are behind a fog and can only be outlined. You can’t actually see the building until you are close up. Another problem is texture pop-ins. If you go to fast and suddenly stop you see a rough canvas all around you. It takes a few seconds to load up the texture of the surroundings. The game does not include installation on startup, which could have solved many of the graphical bugs. 

The other problem is the frame rate. Once there are heavy explosions with a whole military force attacking and the Hulk smashing buildings, the frame rates drop drastically. It is ironic, since the game is purely about destructions and explosions. The developers should have taken extra care to hold the frame rate together. Other than that the character models are good and move very realistically. The destruction looks good but looks scripted. The building ends up in dusts with lots of some and fire as well.

Finally, there are a bunch of unlockables. These include comic covers, concept art, secret characters and landmark tokens. Landmark tokens are found all over the city once any famous building is completely destroyed. The hulk can be replaced by a number of characters like Hulkbuster, Iron Man or Ironclad to name a few. It does not bring any change to gameplay as only the skin and voice tone change a bit. Nothing special unless you are a fan.

Overall it is a very unpolished game. The negative aspects of the game like poor graphics, unstable frame rates, average sound and lackluster voice acting make it one of the worst games of 2008.