Games

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

Platform: Xbox, PS2, GameCube
Price: £39.99
Publisher: Vivendi Universal

Considering his simple, violent nature, it's pretty remarkable that the Incredible Hulk has - until now - never graced a game that really delivers on the primal appeal of the character. His sporadic forays into the realm of video games have been tedious platformers or, in the case of the game of the movie, disappointingly timid and hamstrung by pointless stealth elements.

Seriously, Hulk and stealth are two concepts that should really be kept as far apart as possible.

As Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction comes from the same development team that created the limp movie tie-in, you'd be forgiven for expecting more of the same. What you actually get is one of the purest, most insanely exhilirating action games of the year, and an experience that finally captures the sheer power and presence of this stonking superhero.

Borrowing liberally from the Spider-Man 2 movie game, following a quick tutorial level you're presented with a free-roaming map to explore with glowing markers for one-off challenges and story missions. You're free to move around your environment in whatever way you see fit, and if you fancy stomping around town for a few hours terrifying pedestrians and hurling cars around, you can.

The first thing you notice is that the Hulk really feels like the Hulk. Every footstep booms and rattles the speakers. There's a real sense of weight and power, and the little environmental effects - such as cracked craters in the concrete every time you land from a jump - really help to sell you on the notion that you're in control of a genuine force of nature.

You start out with a fairly small array of moves and attacks. Holding down the relevant button charges up the action, so you can deliver a punch or an earth-shattering piledriver, and jump over cars or buildings, depending on your needs.

Pretty much everything in the game can be destroyed and used in wonderfully instinctual ways. Wrench a lamppost from the ground and use it as a club or a javelin. Pick up a car and you can crush it into a pair of impromptu steel boxing gloves. Run at full speed down a street and you'll send vehicles, people and scenery flying as you charge through the traffic.

Everything you destroy earns you Smash Points. Save these up and you can trade them in at your hideout for new abilities and attacks. As you progress through the story, more and more moves become available, and the escalation in the havoc you can cause is nicely balanced out by a steady increase in the strength of your foes. From hapless cops to bazooka-wielding soldiers to tanks, gunships and even mech-suited Hulkbusters, there's always some new enemy that will test your mettle. And nothing is quite so satisfying as mastering the new combo that will reduce them to scrap iron.

Considering the sheer number of moves on offer, it's good to report that control is intuitive and quick to react. You'll only ever be using a few buttons at a time - there are no long sequences of button presses to remember here. Everything is context sensitive, so you can use the same button while running, jumping or carrying a certain object and the attack will change accordingly.

This means you slip into that wonderful zen-like gaming zone where you can concentrate on how to survive the latest onslaught without having to consciously think about what your thumbs are doing. Run up a wall, deliver a plunging elbow smash on a tank, follow up with a tornado uppercut and finish the job with a devastating atomic slam. You don't think, you just do it - and with the ear-splitting sound effects, it's an addictively compelling simulation of what "being the Hulk" would actually be like.

There are small bones of contention, but to dwell on them would be churlish. The story is fairly slender, and the missions which move it forwards tend to follow the same seek-destroy-flee template, but the destruction is so much fun and so cathartic that the appeal never really wears off. This isn't a game of great depth or longevity. It's a blistering dose of over-the-top fun that grabs you by the scruff of the neck, takes you on a heart-pounding ride and then leaves you gasping for breath. Pure gaming nirvana.