Hulk for the Xbox

Hulk is an action game for the Xbox that takes place after some of the events in the lame movie. The plot is that you are on the hunt for The Leader, who is sort of like an evil version of The Hulk. It features the voice of Eric Bana, who played Bruce Banner in the movie. This game involves lots of fighting and smashing stuff, with a few stealth levels thrown in.

Most of the time, you will play the Hulk and have to bash and fight your way through level after level. There will be countless enemies in your way, especially since they tend to respawn, and you can’t fight them all. To get past certain scenes, you have to fight just enough to let you move on, and then it is best to just move on. When I first started playing this game, I tried to clear the levels before moving, and I kept getting killed. I thought this was a little annoying that the game is designed for you to leave lots of bad guys behind.

In addition to playing the Hulk, there are a few levels where you have to play Bruce Banner. In these levels, you have to sneak around and avoid being seen. I found these Banner levels to be frustrating and not at all fun. Even if they did break up the monotony of the action, they were too tedious and difficult. I mean, this guy is the Incredible friggin’ Hulk, so why should be sneaking around when he could just bust through a wall and do what needs to be done?

The control system is pretty well done, and you can interact a lot with the environment. In addition to jumping and punching, Hulk can pick up most objects and either swing them around or throw them at opponents. A lot of the combat requires you to throw stuff in order to take out bad guys at a distance. You can also rack up combos by hitting more than one enemy at a time. For the most part, I found the controls to be pretty fine-tuned and I didn’t find myself fighting with them. There’s a lot going on in this game, and you can keep on top of things pretty well.

Since this is a 2003 game, it doesn’t make full use of the Xbox’s multimedia capabilities. For one, it doesn’t even support HDTV 480p. The graphics still look good on it, but they could have been sharper. The game does support Dolby Digital surround, but the sound volume seemed to be very low. Also, there is no Xbox Live support, so you won’t be playing this one online. What this all amounts to is that once you have played the game through and finished it, there’s really no incentive to play it again.

I thought the graphics were pretty sweet in this game, even if it doesn’t support HDTV. It uses a lot of shiny white effects for lights, and the animation is very fluid and crisp. It reminded me a lot of the earlier CGI movies (such as Toy Story) with how well-done the movement was portrayed. The game plays very smoothly on the Xbox, and it never slowed down even with a lot of AI-controlled enemies on the screen. The sound was okay, but nothing spectacular. A lot of clues are given via spoken dialogue, so you have to listen closely while playing.

In the end, I enjoyed playing Hulk as a minor distraction, but it wasn’t something I’d want to play over again. The action is too repetitive and the Banner missions are not much fun. I bought this game for less than five bucks off eBay, so at least I don’t feel cheated.