GAME REVIEW: The Incredible Hulk for Xbox 360 & PS3

By Lex Eskobar

With all the summer blockbusters landing at a theatre near you these days, you can expect a slew of video games based on said blockbusters to be hitting local game stores near you as well. I figured what better game to review than the one featuring the Not-So-Jolly Green Giant. He’s green…like weed.

The Incredible Hulk is loosely based on the film starring Edward Norton of Fight Club fame and Tim Roth of Four Rooms. It takes place during the same timeline and features all the actors from the film reprising their roles, or, at least, their roles’ voices, for the game; but it is packed with way more characters and events ripped from the comic book franchise.

The game is set in an open-world sand box style setting in New York City and features fully destructible buildings, vehicles and people. Sega took a page from Hulk: Ultimate Destruction’s book when making this game for sure but bumped up the visuals to next gen console quality. The game features multiple mini games, regular story driven missions and unlockable content.

The controls are pretty decent, with a simple yet fun combo system and a really rewarding physics engine that allows The Hulk to fly through the air as he leaps and bounds from building to building in the Big Apple. Even when I didn’t feel like doing missions, I greatly enjoyed smoking and then rampaging the city on a quest of destruction and mayhem, much like those GTA free roam play-throughs we all know and love.

The music is pretty basic with a few different scores that repeat throughout, but they stay true to the style of the film, which seems to suit the game. The difficulty isn’t too high but there are times the game can become frustrating due to too many enemies on screen attacking you at once or occasional glitches that send The Hulk bouncing back and forth trapped in a perpetual state of jump.

Overall, The Incredible Hulk is a much more rewarding and fun experience than Iron Man, Sega’s other comic-to-game release this summer. At the very least The Incredible Hulk is worth a rental, but I think you may actually get some lasting replay value out of this game. Some people will say Ultimate Destruction was a better game but that doesn’t make this game bad by any means. Light one up and smoke some sticky green with the Big Green this summer. The Incredible Hulk gets 3 out of 5 pot leaves.