Smash!
Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 8
Sound: 8
Lifeline: 6
Enjoyment: 6
The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is a game that challenges you throughout, through the quantity of things you have to bring down rather than reinventing itself and coming up with more than 1 type of challenging mission for you to complete. Great for having fun and venting frustration; unfortunately however, it’s the game itself that will most likely cause you to turn the game off in frustration more times than any game should.
First of all, one of the greatest parts of this game is its fundamental gameplay: smash things up and have fun doing so. Infact, it works perfectly, feels fantastic and is oddly original enough to feel fresh and exciting. Fortunately for the game, you are free to do this and nothing else. Roaming around the city wrecking havoc whenever and on whoever you feel like is great, especially when you unlock the meter that resembles the system in GTA in which greater force will track you down depending on the quantity of destruction you decide to cause. The simplicity of doing all this also makes the game even more enjoyable and sees you being able to scale skyscrapers with the ease of holding down one button and pushing the analogue stick upwards. After that you can jump around, throw cars into helicopters, use rocket launches to destroy whole buildings and when that’s all got boring you have a whole choice of ‘side-missions’ to do which are somewhat better fun than the game’s storyline missions.
Centred on only two areas and some boss levels, the missions are fairly simple and fun to do at first. After a few hours or so however you will find yourself reluctantly doing them and getting very annoyed whilst doing so. One of the reasons why the game is so frustratingly frustrating is its difficulty. At a certain point within the mission modes you will all of a sudden take giant leaps in difficulty varying from very easy to mind numbingly annoying. These missions will no doubt take a while to wear down and finally get past, if however you picked up this game for its fast-paced destruction; you probably won’t enjoy doing that so much. The bosses that you encounter within the story mode are somewhat more diverse than the regular missions and do more than often require a few tries. Most of it however will rely on you simply smashing the hell out of them.
What really disappoints me about Hulk is the game’s storyline missions which mainly focus around making you destroy things to get to more things of which you have to protect and bring back to your hideout. The reason you’re doing this repetitive task over and over is simply to build some sort of machine that works as a way to bridge the gap between Bruce Banner and his alter ego, the ‘Hulk’. In turn, Banner and his friend hope to find out how to control the beast and rid of him forever; that’s the story and I’ll admit it’s not that great.
Another thing about the gameplay that bothers me so much is the vast array of manoeuvres of which you are able to buy upon going through the missions and acquiring ‘destruction points’. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of work has went into these special moves and some look and sound amazing when done properly. The thing is there’s just way too much of them to comprehend and remember. Some are simple enough asking you to hold down one button or two, a lot more of the better ones however you can only do whilst in certain situations and require a good amount of button remembering. So as a result you probably won’t do certain moves more than once, making it a hugely unnecessary feature.
Visuals within Hulk are overall pretty average but when you take into consideration the amount of interaction you can have with your environment, the really are pretty impressive. Smashing things up and throwing them into other things will look fairly realistic and the sound does well on most occasions to accompany that realism to a good extent. Even as a backdrop, the city looks very atmospheric the only problem is that it all looks a bit rough, which isn’t that bad. The voice acting is done very well and features no real flaws, Hulk however could have sounded a little more powerful to the extent that Hulk should sound like. Explosions, and all the other sound effects sound fantastic, on a few occasions with some special moves however, the sound sounds terribly weak and lets it down quite dramatically.
So in a nutshell, The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is a great game that only seems to last a short while. It’s a shame that something better wasn’t born out of such great and innovative gameplay outside the repetitive story missions. Featuring decent graphics and sound, you probably won’t be cheated out on a good Hulk experience. One piece of advice however is to keep the experience limited to one on the basis of rental. Try this game only if you feel the need to, it’s not necessary however and you probably won’t miss that much if you don’t. An average game with some fantastic elements and some not-so fantastic, Hulk will no doubt entertain you greatly, as long as you play it on easy.
Overall: 7.0/10
