The Incredible Hulk (Wii) Review

Oh yes, this game sure is an 'interesting' attempt at 'next-gen'. New York City itself is massive, which is great, but you can only ever see about one street in front of you. For some reason a thick Beijing-style fog has befallen the poor people of NYC making it almost impossible to see anything beyond your face. Buildings randomly pop out of the ether and flicker to and from view before finally becoming a permanent fixture on the skyline. And it gets worse. Walk up to a building and you'll see it is constructed with lots of horrible blocky lines with all the texture definition and detail of a very poorly designed N64 game. The saving grace is that you can knock down just about any building in the entire city, so then you'll just be surrounded by a very big, flat, foggy wasteland. Yes, the city is big, but so was the environment in GTA III on the PS2 and that still looked pretty damn hot.

If you can manage to peer past the fog you'll find a pretty standard 'punch stuff, punch more stuff and punch big stuff' game. You start off with a nice little tutorial in Alaska which involves you punching stuff and being all Hulky. Here you're interested to the rather clunky controls that plague the Wii version from start to finish. Yes, you guessed it, wiggle. Shake the nunchuk and press buttons on the Wii-mote and Hulk will smash, crash, bash and probably even flash if you do it for long enough. It all gets rather repetitive. Our main problem isn't with the rubbish control system, but more with the execution. It is extremely unresponsive meaning you'll be sitting there waving the nunchuk around only for poor old Hulk to just stand there looking bored. We reckon it works out what you're doing just over half the time and for the other half simply doesn't pick up your movements.

After this training mission the game opens up into the vast (but foggy) world of NYC. You can take on a new mission whenever you please or simply run around admiring the lack of scenery. We particularly like how terrible Time Square looks. You can travel around the city on the Subway system, which is rather clever but also a bit confusing...how does Hulk fit on a tube train and does he sit down when he gets on? The mind boggles. The main missions range from protection to destruction and a bit of running around finding stuff too. You battle against the Enclave, a group of evil scientists hellbent on doing lots of evil stuff. As the game progresses the missions remain pretty much the same but enemies get bigger, take more punching and erm...not much else. In this game, everything is solved with frantic wiggling of your arms and negligible use of your noodle. If you fancy battling the army you can punch lots of stuff and annoy people and, like the police in GTA they'll come running...and shooting.

To start a mission you simply walk up to a highlighted zone and you'll be off and away. The better you do the more 'Feats' you unlock which in turn give Hulk new and improved abilities and moves. The main game itself really doesn't take long to complete, but if you want to make Hulk all singing, all dancing and all smashing then at least the option is open to you.

Much like the visual impact of this game, the audio is the equivalent of someone farting right into your ear. Unpleasant. The voice acting, although using film actors, is lazy and pretty lacking in any sort of emotion and the soundtrack is so boring and unnoticeable that we just had to boot up the game again to remind us what it is. Needless to say, it isn't worth mentioning any further. Chuck in a camera that you have to move yourself by holding the minus button and actually pointing the Wii-mote and you have a gaming experience that is unremarkable, clunky and really poorly executed.