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knight0fkh0nshu
349,873
TA Score for this game: 2,017
Posted on 17 April 11 at 22:48 |
This review has 19 positive votes and 1 negative vote. Please log in to vote. |
The Incredible Hulk Review
We all know how movie tie-ins are when it comes to the video games. Quite frankly most of them are horrendous. Enter The Incredible Hulk. Developer Edge of Twilight, infamously known for their last generation games Shark Tale and Over The Hedge, may have made their best work yet. But is that enough to escape the stereotypical disappointment of movie-to-video game tie-ins?
The Incredible Hulk is based extremely loosely off of it's movie tie-in counterpart. There are some familair scenes that you will noticed that have originated from the movie, but most of these don't follow exactly how the movie played them out. The games starts you off in Brazil in a brief cutscene that shows you running from the U.S. Army. No long after that you assume control of the Hulk. You smash your way through a warehouse and then you end up in New York City.
Edge Of Reality did a great job in making you feel as you are truly the Hulk. Anything that you can get into your reach, you can smash it. The attack system is very basic. You do have your combos that you can do by pressing combinations of buttons. You also can upgrade the Hulks powers by acquiring certain feats (ex. find 10 comics, kill 50 enemies with rage powers, etc). The camera can be a bit awkward at times. It feels like it was just too close to the Hulk and you don't get a great perspective of the enemies when they are around you. If you are expecting to play as Bruce Banner, then don't. He only appears in the cutscenes. I don't really see how they could have effectively encorperated him into the game and made it as fun as smashing everything you see as the Hulk.
I'm glad that they did get the cast to lend a hand in the video game. If there's one thing that really bugs me when watching a movie and then going to play the video game tie-in is that the voices have completely changed. Although throughout the whole game you don't get that sense of emphasis in the dialogue, especially with Bruce Banner (Ed Norton). As far as smashing goes...it sounds exactly the way it should. The city seems life like. People screaming as you run by, "Ah it's a monster!".
The cutscenes aren't as crisp and clear as you would expect from this current generation of consoles. The building smashing is fun and watching them crumble down to their foundations is completely satisfactory. For an open world game, Edge of Reality did a great job on the destruction of the vehicles, trees, buildings and anything else you can get your hands on. It's not realistic looking, but going into this game I didn't expect it to be either.
Most sandbox games do a poor job at delivering a good achievement list. As for The Incredible Hulk, it's pretty solid. Apart from the tedious "collectible achievements" most of the achievements are fairly simple and straightforward. Such as climbing the 5 tallest buildings, destroy a building in each neighborhood, kill 50 enemies with rage powers. Then they have some of the more unique ones like "Around the World In 80 Steps which requires you to cross the tops of the flagpoles outside the U.N. Building. Most of the achievements will come from the main storyline, as with most games. The most frustrating one that I found was getting gold on all mini-games which really wasn't that bad once you try them a few times.
Overall Edge of Reality did a really good job with The Incredible Hulk. There are a few things they could have done to make it better, but it's a great experience for a sandbox game. I like the inclusion of some of the landmarks such as The Sanctum Sanctatorum, Baxter Building, and others. This is a fun experience especially if you're either a comic book fan and/or a sandbox lover.
Story: 4
Gameplay: 8
Sound: 7
Graphics: 7
Achievements: 6
Final Rating: 6.4
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RRIKER
102,632
TA Score for this game: 2,017
Posted on 31 December 08 at 04:41, Edited on 27 August 12 at 17:40 |
This review has 18 positive votes and 8 negative votes. Please log in to vote. |
The Incredible Hulk (a multi-platform release) is the spiritual sequel to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the Xbox and PS2. There are some graphical updates to the original free-roaming sandbox game, as with just about any 6th-to-7th generation franchise, but you didn't pick this game up because it was pretty.
You took it home because of one reason: HULK SMASH!!!
While you are free to roam the streets of New York City, picking up 2 types of hidden canisters and getting gold medals in mini-games (Whack-a mole, checkpoint race, kill-a-ma-jig)and causing general mayhem AND destruction of famous landmarks, there is a storyline which somewhat resembles the movie of the same name. In addition to these brief and bland (protect this person, lift this thing and carry across the city, defeat boss X), you get to do side missions featuring some of the more prominent Hulk enemies from the comics.
The achievements are somewhat well-rounded objective-wise, but the values are all out of whack. Two of the hardest achievements ("Fear of Falling", "Struck-out") are worth a paltry 5g. Destroying a building in each neighborhood nets you 25g, yet is almost impossible to avoid. There is also an issue with the Iron Man save. Two achievements (Shell-head and Patron of the Arts) require said save, but claims you can just as easily use the save from the Iron Man demo available on the marketplace. There has been some mixed success and the root cause has not been revealed.
Update (Aug. 2012): not sure what happened, but people on this very site were able to get both without Iron Man saves. Check out the awesome solutions for more info
Overall, not a bad game and truly a worthy update to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. The controls may be awkward at first, and the mini game gold medals can drive you insane, but the only persistent uncurable problem is the freezing. Quite often, the game will glitch out and freeze in random spots, forcing you to re-start your xbox and losing all of your saved progress. Especially frustrating when collecting hidden canisters.
When it comes right down to it, if you are considering this game for playability, take a look at Ultimate Destruction first as it may surprise you (and you can get it for under $10). If you're looking for some easy achievements, expect a slight challenge, but nothing more than 20 hours of grinding and MS Paint for the canister maps won't cure.
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