The Incredible Hulk

[Hand drags down face]

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I'd rather engage in coitus with my own face than play another minute of The Incredible Hulk: The Official Videogame. I would love to leave this review at just that. I really would. But journalistic integrity and pretty much being forced to write more - if I want a career in journalism that'll survive the credit crunch - urges me to divulge my full vitriol at everyone and anyone associated with the development and sale of this game. Marvel, I'm looking at you - you sit there, putting your stamp on faeces and laughing about it, counting the money like the corporate devils you've become - kids and overweight, bearded adults look up to you.

Sega, oh Sega, you should know better than this. And HMV man, who sells this to naïve children who know no better, all they see is their favouritest in the world superhero on a box and they want it - leave your job, stick two fingers up at the man, be free, not a part of this... this cesspool of conglomeratary, because Incredible Hulk: The Official Videogame is what happens when the man gets what he wants.

There's nothing remotely decent about this title. Obviously you play the Hulk, all raged up smashing stuff, people, walls, cars, pretty much anything - which, funnily enough is about what I felt like doing at the time - jumping from mission to mission in a sandbox environment that would make Niko Belic tug on his penis and weep. To call the world that The Hulk inhabits 'sandbox' is videogame blasphemy in itself. What you've got is essentially a group of high-rise blocks that can be scaled and smashed (all smashing of buildings has the same graphical effect) in an admittedly decent sized city. The size isn't the issue though; it's the lack of variety. Every building looks almost identical (barring the landmarks of NYC), and in reality, the missions could all play out in the same five or six blocks. Climb to the top of one of these buildings and you're greeted with a draw distances akin to the long-sightedness of a blind man. Literally the closest 'skyscrapers' clip and poke into view creating the worst kind of slowdown and, ultimately, crashes.

The enemies are similarly bland and samey. Where combat should be the main staple of quality in a game of this ilk, this manages to insist on button bashing. Tutorials maintain that you can combine the buttons to pull off combos - something Streets of Rage was successful in doing as well. The Hulk can use objects as projectiles, as long as you don't mind that the direction he throws them in is as random as The Mighty Boosh. Jumping around the map offers some sort of entertainment, but the lack of any decent animation and physics leave this massively lacking and largely unsatisfying. Equally irritating is that there isn't actually much benefit to climbing a building to reach your objective. You can quite as easily run round the streets in half the time. Occasionally when you are forced the scale a skyscraper the lack of any genuine variation makes for an apathetic period of existence.

The storyline has little, if anything, to do with the film - a flitting in and out of the celluloid narrative might have been an interesting aside though, but, obviously, it doesn't happen. One perplexing task sees The Hulk saving a bloke who's having his mind controlled as he is about to be thrown from a building. As you arrive said man is now not only being forced to jump but is also being blasted to hell as well. Why take him to a rooftop? Why not shoot him in the head? Why, after making the effort to take this man to the top of a building, shoot him? Why not shoot him in his flat, or take him to a room somewhere? His captors are armed with guns that shoot lasers, protected by futuristic armour and forcefields, but I'm supposed to believe that they don't have a room to take him to. I want to drag my nails down my face.

Naturally I hate The Incredible Hulk: The Official Videogame. I hate it for all those that enjoy playing computer games; for those who immerse themselves in our sub-culture; for the kids who're too young to appreciate how awful this is; for the fan-boys punching walls until they see the white-meat; for Play.tm who are forced to sully its pages with the mere mention of the game (and with it this review), and for myself because I had to play it for hours, and for the missus for watching me play it for the five minutes she could stand.

In the face of the political mess in Zimbabwe, the economic mess and knife-happy teenagers here in the UK, and the ongoing disaster in Iraq, the Incredible Hulk: The Official Videogame eclipses them all in making me unhappy.

30%

By Gary Flavell