The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction Hands On
Thursday, March 24, 2005

The following was originally posted on Gamespot.com:

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction Hands-On

SAN FRANCISCO--Earlier today, during a meeting with representatives from Radical Entertainment, we had our first opportunity to check out playable PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions of The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. Announced in December of last year, the game draws inspiration from Marvel's Hulk comic books and, as we were told on more one occasion, is definitely not a sequel to last year's movie-inspired Hulk offering.

Before we got hands-on with The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, we got to see a trailer for the game that did a great job of showing off some of its most interesting features. The trailer was set almost exclusively in the large free-roaming city in which much of the game takes place, and it showed Hulk leaping between and scaling tall buildings, picking up vehicles to throw at enemies and using them as melee weapons, and basically destroying just about everything in sight. Even more interesting, though, were the gameplay clips that showed Hulk "weaponizing" various environmental objects, which we'll talk about in more detail shortly.

Considering the large number of moves at Hulk's disposal (there are more than 150 total, although not all of them will be available to you at the start of the game), we were pleasantly surprised by just how easy he was to control. Shoulder buttons were used for running, scaling buildings, and locking on to enemies, while the four face buttons were used for jumping, picking stuff up, weaponizing objects, and performing various attacks. We were able to destroy just about everything in the city that we wanted to just by throwing Hulk's fists and nearby vehicles around, and the action got even more varied and satisfying once we started experimenting with various objects and weaponizations.

Weaponization, in case you're wondering, is the term that Radical Games has come up with to describe the act of Hulk turning an object into a weapon. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction will feature around 20 different types of weaponization in total, and we were able to check out quite a few of them during our time spent playing through the game's first mission. One of the first things we did, for example, was pick up a car and, with a single press of the weaponization button, snap it in half so the two pieces essentially became steel boxing gloves. Predictably, this made Hulk's punches even more powerful than normal. We also noticed that when we decided to discard the "gloves," Hulk didn't just take them off and drop them. Instead, he hurled them both forward as projectile weapons.

Other weaponizations that we had a lot fun with included: flattening the middle portion of a bus so we could ride it like a skateboard around the city, hold it like a shield, and even throw it like a boomerang; using a large gas station sign as a bowling ball; catching a missile that was fired at us and throwing it back at an enemy; and using a large inflatable character taken from the roof of a tall building to float through the air. We also turned an uprooted lamppost into a baseball bat at one point and proceeded to knock policemen and enemy soldiers high into the air. We were later told that Hulk baseball will actually be one of a number of different minigames in Ultimate Destruction, along with Hulk surfing and, believe it or not, Hulk golf.

As our time with The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction came to an end, we were afforded a quick look at the game's second environment, a desert region known as Badlands. What we actually saw was one of the game's many boss fights in which Hulk was going one-on-one with a mech that was noticeably larger than he. Details on additional boss fights are being kept under wraps right now, but the Radical representatives on hand did let slip that Abomination and a number of other enemies from the comics will appear in the game. They further mentioned that some of Hulk's enemies will be up to 15 times larger than he is. Some of these enemies will be so big, in fact, that we're told the only way to beat them will be to scale them (in the same way you can scale large buildings) before attacking specific areas.

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is currently scheduled for release in August, so we'll bring you more information on the game as soon as it becomes available.

By Justin Calvert, GameSpot  POSTED: 03/09/05 01:16 PM

Gamespot.com has a whole section devoted to this game, including interviews, screenshots and more. Check it out here.

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