The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction Review

Yeah Yeah, We Know You're Angry...

It isn’t all cake and icing for Ultimate Destruction, however. You do have a lot of moves to play around with and you open up more all of the time, but the game starts to lose its luster fairly quickly because you can only smash so many cars and drop kick so many people before you have seen and done it all. Creating your own fun is part of the attraction in a game like this and goofing off outside of missions will make up most of your play time with Ultimate Destruction. It is when you are goofing off, though, that the technical limitations of the game rear their ugly heads. Basically, the Hulk can physically throw stuff beyond the memory limitations of the game. Things will just disappear out of thin air never to be seen again. Also, there are rarely more than a handful of people or vehicles onscreen at any given time and efforts to stockpile stuff for massive explosions later are met with more disappearing acts. You are severely limited in your ability to innovate and while you do have a lot of things you can do, it all starts to feel rather mindless and repetitive after a while.

Graphics and Sound

Graphically, Ultimate Destruction is a nice looking game overall. The environments and people wandering around aren’t super-detailed, but they get the job done and everything blows up real nice. A nice effect is that when you run around on the side of a building, smash something on the ground, or just jump around, the game world shows damage on everything you touch. The Hulk himself also looks really nice and is fairly well animated. There is a lot of pop-in (and out), however, which is detrimental to gameplay because it seems silly that the Hulk can throw something beyond the memory of the game. I want to throw a bus off of the top of a skyscraper and then jump down to the street and keep using it, darn it, but the game won’t let you.

The sound is also well done. Sound effects for all of the destruction you are causing are particularly good. There is also quite a bit of voice work in the game and all of the voice actors do a really great job of bringing the game world to life.

Bottom Line

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is one of the best comic book games yet and is highly recommended. It gives you lots and lots of destructive moves to use and a lot of space to use them in, so it is just about everything a Hulk fan could ever want. There are some technical issues that will hinder the fun of the more imaginative gamers among us, but overall Ultimate Destruction will satisfy most of your destructive, Hulked-out fantasies. I highly recommend The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for at least a rental but I think most action and comic book fans will be very happy with a purchase.