[Review] The Incredible Hulk

[Spring*]

f there's one lesson to be learned from Sega's The Incredible Hulk movie-based game, it's that Hulk is a big bully. When tasked with containing a radioactive outbreak that could potentially eliminate all life within his city, he is just as likely to take a detour to destroy the Empire State Building or bat pedestrians into the Hudson River. It's far more enticing to see how many taxicabs you can blow up with one swing from a lamppost than to protect your pal Rick from a swarm of angry robots. The Incredible Hulk is at its best when you unleash the full destructive power of this terrifying giant to fulfill your own twisted desires. Ultimately, though, the repetition of mission structures, severe graphical glitches, and game-halting bugs wrestle this 1,000-pound monster to the ground. The sheer destructive joy of rampaging through New York is hard to ignore, but it's even harder to ignore the problems plaguing your every step.

The Incredible Hulk plays in much the same way as Radical's The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, released three years ago. You are set loose in a re-creation of New York City--complete with landmarks from both real life and the Marvel universe--and you can choose exactly how you want to level this fine city you’re supposed to protect. You can turn any object you see lying around into a weapon of mass destruction, or unleash an array of charge-based super moves by metabolizing your rage. Though there isn't a lot of variety in either your combat moves or techniques to cause general chaos, being the biggest jerk in all of New York provides simple, though brutal fun. The Incredible Hulk does a good job of making you feel like a very angry monstrosity and, more importantly, it's quite satisfying to imitate Hulk on a very bad day.

The graphics are startlingly incomplete. The character models outside of cutscenes are properly detailed, but the city itself is overflowing with texture pop-in and severe draw-in. You can see only a little way in front of you before buildings become hazy and dark blue. When you climb to the top of the Chrysler Building, you are treated with a foggy view more reminiscent of a posteruption Pompeii than modern-day New York City. This may be a clever homage to an unknown issue of Hulk in which he visited the eye doctor, but it makes for a suffocating video game. Even the lighting effects suffer from draw-in.