At Comic-Con this year, I was extremely lucky to come by a demo disc from Activision for The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. This yet-to-be-released title is a somewhat new way to play with The Hulk, but from playing the demo it seems all you do is blow stuff up, throw things around and collect little coins in the same enraged manner one would normally expect from The Hulk. It’s really not that exciting otherwise.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is another one of the free-form, wide-open cities that you can run around in and destroy, similar to Activision’s own Spiderman 2, except here you have to collect things to increase your “Smash Points” in a limited amount of time. Since this is a demo, the time limit may not be a part of the final game, since demos in general are usually limited. Regardless, the game is very simple. You collect some stuff, you throw around some cars, you smash gas stations and buses, blowing stuff up with your mighty combos/special attacks, and climb up buildings while ruining the foundation and a couple of windows.
The game does have the potential of becoming fast-paced in your spree of destruction, as your “Threat” level increases more and more enemies come to subdue you. Forces that try to stop you include police, police cars, a trigger-happy helicopter that has no reservations about launching a few missiles in the middle of a city, and a large mechanized robot that seemingly comes out of nowhere. All of this is fun and delightful, but each enemy is relatively easy to defeat. I’m guessing that there are going to be some sort of bosses integrated into the full version for more complex, pulverizing fun by the looks of that randomly tossed-in mechanized robot.
The graphics presented in the Playstation 2 demo are quite stale. While they’re not necessarily PSOne quality, they do give that feeling, and the Playstation 2 could definitely do better (and I hope it looks even better on the other consoles). The sound seems okay, probably because there are explosions every other second, creating the “ultimate destruction” feeling, even if the frame-rate drops when a few happen at once. I basically didn’t notice any music since it was drowned out by so much “ultimate destruction.”
From what is presented in this demo, it seems like The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction won’t be much better than a possible rental, and not really something that should be paid fifty, forty or even thirty dollars for. While the Teen rating attached suggests that it could be more entertaining for the younger crowd who just like to push buttons and play as a super hero, older gamers should probably look elsewhere.