The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Written by: Eric Topf

We were given a tour of Vivendi Universal’s offerings for the Xbox at the recently concluded Game Developers Conference, and came away impressed with what we saw – just as Spider-Man 2 gave the gaming community a glimpse as to how the sandbox design could provide for enjoyable experiences other than drive-by shootings, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is ready to rewrite the rules of open-ended environments once again, this time by letting players literally tear them down.

The games’ designers took us through a playable demo of the title and were quite eager to show off its destructive qualities. Indeed, the developers were quick to ask us if we could find another game out there that offered the kind of wanton destruction in the environments – each of which is nothing short of astonishingly huge and almost entirely destructible (the developers estimated that 95% of the objects in the environments could be manipulated). Players are able to use the Hulk’s various abilities to explore the city as they see fit, making for a unique transportation experience. We watched as the player guided Hulk around the cityscape environment and performed all sorts of cool and completely havoc inducing moves. For all his bulk, the Hulk sure is acrobatic. We witnessed this for ourselves as the Hulk ran up the sides of buildings, jumped from rooftop to rooftop, and tossed people around like dolls.

The more intriguing gameplay aspects of the title that were shown off were the Hulk’s ability to take everyday objects that you see in a city and “transform” them into weapons and items that the Hulk can use to destroy even more things. We watched as the Hulk crushed to cars together and used the wreckage as Iron knuckles. We also saw the Hulk take a bus and flatten it into a pancake, which he then used as a shield, a boomerang and a “skateboard” to grind around the town. Hell, even the ground is destructible, as jumping or falling from a great height will result in Hulk finding himself standing in a sizeable crater.

Of course, simply beating the ever loving crap out of innocent NPCs and the environment isn’t the singular goal of the game, as players will be offered a litany of story driven and optional side missions to partake in. One of the stronger motivations for engaging in the side missions is the accumulation of points which can be exchanged for various abilities and attacks. Players start off the game with a huge list of attacks, and they are capable of buying up to 150 techniques in total over the course of the game. These techniques obviously come in handy when dealing with the more well-armed authorities that spring into action as a result of the ensuing mayhem, but we’re hoping that the comic-book inspiration gives way to more engaging opponents and super-villains.

Graphically the game is very nice looking; the environments have very good draw distance and are loaded with objects. Everything is rendered in a comic-book style, particularly the Hulk character model which looks as though it jumped right out of a panel – the proportions, coloration and design are all incredibly faithful to the source material. We were told that there would be around 30 levels in the final build along with some bonus unlockable levels.