A decent rental for big-time Hulk fans (like myself), but technically speaking.......this game is a mess.
'The Incredible Hulk' is a poster child for how NOT to do a game based on a movie. As most of us gamers know by now, most of the time these games based on a movie are terrible. Why are they always terrible? Because the game has a definite release date that can't change no matter what. The game MUST come out in time to take advantage of the hype around the movie and drive sales. That leaves the developer in the horrible position of either missing a release date (which isn't going to happen) or put out an unfinished, buggy, and generally crappy product. 'The Incredible Hulk' falls right into that territory. Sadly, there is a very fun game here under all the bugs and mediocre game development. It's hard to get to the fun parts when the game crashes and has lots of other performance issues that will hamper your experience.
Anyone who played 'The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction' for the last generation of consoles will see what developer 'Edge Of Reality' is going for here. This is an open world, Grand Theft Auto style of game where you control the Hulk. You can do missions in any order you like, play mini-games to break up the storyline, or just run around the city causing havoc and smashing everything.
The "smashing everything" part of the game ends up being the most fun, unfortunately. The storyline and missions here are absolutely garbage. I loved the newest Hulk movie (and some of the storyline was taken from that), but the new plot lines they added are crap. While it's fun to fight the Bi-Beast and U-Foes, their existence isn't fleshed out enough to make sense. Everything that didn't happen in the movie was just thrown in here, very sloppily, just to extend the game. And the story is told through AWFUL cut-scenes. The characters look terrible and nothing like the real actors. The cast does their actual voices for the game, but they clearly are giving no effort here.
Throughout my time playing this game, I kept wanting to love it and have a lot of fun. This is mostly because I have been such a fan of the Hulk since I was a kid and collecting the comics. But the game has so many design faults, I wonder how 'Edge Of Reality' let this game out the door and can even call themselves a development company. Other than the Hulk character himself, this game looks like a PS2/Xbox game. Everything here is last generation, especially the cut-scenes I mentioned earlier. There is TONS of pop-up and draw-in all over the place. The framerate drops like crazy when there is anything big going on, which with the Hulk, should be most of the time.
The game will crash on you on many occasions. This is extremely frustrating since the game has a terrible checkpoint/save system. It's inexcusable for a game to crash anyways, but having to re-play the last half-hour of your life is insanely annoying. And I am still trying to figure out how the game can look so bad, but yet make my Xbox 360 sound like it's going to hold up the 'white flag' and surrender. And don't even get me started on the lack of ANY memorable music or sound effects.
Like I said, this game is a mess. It's clear the game is unfinished and shouldn't have been released in this condition. 'Edge Of Reality' is to blame here, as a development company knows what it's signing on for when they agree to make a game that's based on a movie. And Sega should have more sense than forcing a company to release a game that is clearly broken. Gaming has always been about companies making money, but in the gaming world, this is about as bad as it gets. These movie-based games are almost always pure crap and, unfortunately for big Hulk fans, this game is no different.