The Incredible Hulk Review (Wii)

Bruce Banner is back in his second major blockbuster, The Incredible Hulk, the movie of which the video game is designed to follow.

Hollywood very rarely has a mega blockbuster movie without a tie-in video game, this time the difficult challenge was left with Edge of Reality to try and break the mould and actually make something work.

Everyone should be familiar with the story by now, so let's get straight to the point, the game. The Incredible Hulk loosely follows the movie and stars off with you having to escape a facility. This first area acts as a training ground and teaches you the basic moves.

The combat system is simple to begin with, there are only a couple of different attacks to learn at the very beginning. Smashing your way through doors and guards you also learn one of the first "special" commands which is your recharge method, this is executed by first completing a button combo before shaking your nunchuk like an idiot.

After completing the training level your free to run loose around New York City, you can explore the city all you want, but actually there isn't alot to do. Once you get bored, its time to find some missions which are marked on your map and triggered by walking into some rather brightly coloured beams.

Missions follow parts of the movie and all start with a cut scene setting up the storyline. It's hard to describe the mission content but pretty much every time it involves alot of jumping and a alot of smashing - not alot else I'm afraid.

You occasionally need to pick something or someone up and take it somewhere but then its back to jumping and smashing, do you see the pattern?

After working your way through the different missions you do magically "learn" new skills which sadly don't really improve gameplay that much. For example finding a can of "rage" makes Hulk super duper angry for a short while, making it easier to expel the silly enemy who try to attack you.

This familiar smash and grab gameplay soon gets tiring and offers little to those who have played similar before, encountering boss battles are also hit and miss, some are more fun than others.

The Incredible Hulk suffers quite badly from poor detail and low resolution textures, the graphics even for Wii aren't great and the game looks unexpectedly bland when compared to it's Xbox bigger brother.

It wouldn't be hard to believe that Edge of Reality concentrated their efforts on the more powerful consoles, the graphics are one of the more important elements to the game given its linear simplistic gameplay. With the rather awkward controls its quite clear that The Incredible Hulk is the teams first attempt at harnessing the Wii control system.

We rarely come across games these days with such awful camera systems, fighting enemies while your camera is stuck behind a wall is deeply infuriating and should never happen after 15 years of 3D games.

The game has been presented fairly well with acceptable cut scenes and sound, the bottom line is that The Incredible Hulk suffers, much like Superman, from being a character/story that simply doesn't translate well into the world of video games.