Written by Jeff Buckland, 6/18/2008
Played on:
Xbox 360
Summer marches on and here we are again with another comic book to movie to video game adaptation. This time it's for The Incredible Hulk, a sort of re-imagining with a new star (Fight Club's Edward Norton) and an adjustment to the formula. Unfortunately, adjustment is not really what the last summer Hulk game, Ultimate Destruction, needed. It just needed a better budget and a bit more time.
And that's not what this game seems to have gotten. The Hulk moves slower this year, mostly due to the way he climbs buildings rather than running sideways directly up them, and fighting overall just seems a little more like it's dominated by timing big, slow attacks. Sure, the developers at Edge of Reality have done a passable job in recreating New York City and letting you roam around and choose between at least a couple of missions at a time, but the visuals fall flat after about 30 feet away from the Hulk. From up high, you'll see buildings in the distance rendered as untextured cubes - Sega, the publisher for this game, should have spent some money on a decent game engine and given the developers the resources to make NYC look at least a little better.
The tasks that the Hulk is set on are banal and repetitive. Half of them are escort quests that can fail for you if you accidentally fall off of the rooftop you're fighting on just once, and the other half pretty much all have the same goals - kill the enemies and possibly also break something that they're protecting. That's it. And while a lot of effort has gone into the Hulk's ability to bash up walls and buildings and eventually cause the whole buildings to crumble, one is left wondering why he's doing so many noble things to save this city if he's going to take down half of the place in the process. Hell, that could have been a pretty interesting theme for the game and maybe even might have worked as a gameplay device - don't break any buildings open on this mission! - but instead, the cutscenes and tossed-together story focus much more on inane plots by stereotypical bad guys. Edward Norton, Tim Roth, and the cast of the movie did lend their voices and likenesses to this, but don't expect much at all. They clearly didn't put the same effort into this as they did the movie, and I don't blame them since the game's script is dull.
Here and there you'll find some fun. There's a GTA-like threat system with multiple levels of armed response to your demolition of the city, although with the ability to heal the Hulk to full very often with a special power, there's not much challenge to staying at the highest threat level. Making weapons out of cars, lampposts, and other enemies does certainly have its merit, and eventually you will gain some new abilities like being able to tear a car in two and make each piece wrap around your hand as steel gauntlets. It's goofy, but it's amusing. Unfortunately, that's about the limit of humor you'll get; much of the charming silliness that the developers of Hulk: Ultimate Destruction got away with is simply gone here, as the missions degenerate into the same boring snoozefests you've seen in superhero games quite a few times now.
Still, there is something enjoyable in just going around and being an ass in New York City as the Hulk. Hit your sprint button and crush cars as you barrel down a street, throw people off of tall buildings (only to watch them always get back up afterwards), or take out major NYC landmarks just because you can. The thing is, all that fun can be had in about a half an hour, which admittedly is longer than the even less-interesting Iron Man game will last any serious gamer. Trying to actually complete Hulk entails funneling you into repeated challenges that the Hulk isn't always equipped to deal with, so the player will have to make up for those weaknesses in rather un-fun ways. And this game isn't terribly great for kids, either, since it's rated Teen and does much more to reward kids for destroying a city (mostly through graphics) than it does to reward them for saving it. Replay value is pretty much nil here, as well, since it's just the single player game and nothing else. The unlockables are the most basic and will be almost completely uninteresting to most.
Boss fights are tough in The Incredible Hulk, as they have specific weaknesses which you'll have to carefully exploit in order to win. Not doing those things will get you killed quickly, and with the amount of choice (at least, on the surface) this game gives you, the boss fights become exercises in tedious work rather than "Hulk smash" fun.
Edge of Reality seems to simply not have had enough time or money to do anything original with The Incredible Hulk. This is a pretty classic example of what's wrong with summer movie games, where the most fun can be had reliving that short theater experience from last Friday night with an hour of screwing around for fun. Sure, there's another several hours of tedium, but why bother when so many other great games that cost the same or less wait on store shelves? I think gamers would be happier if these summer Hollywood games were shorter overall, had more resources invested in a more entertaining and focused core, and then cost something closer to a budget price to start. But as long as people are buying these mediocre games in high volumes, then publishers like Sega are gonna keep selling them the way they are.
