Assassin’s Creed 2 came out yesterday and I didn’t get it because I didn’t have any cash. Therefore, I’m inspired to start a new review series. In this series, I’ll be reviewing games that are obviously awful for a variety of reasons, even if they have their good points, and further drilling into you WHY they’re awful from personal experience. Today’s Shake n Bake with shards of glass covered in super AIDS: The Incredible Hulk for the XBox 360.

Why would I ever rent something like this? Well, two reasons. One, I’d heard the same company that made it also made Prototype. This was wrong, actually, though Radical Entertainment DID make a Hulk game and the similarities are…uncanny.

Yeeeeaaaahhhh…anyway…the second reason is my rental is offering a trial run of renting out free games every so often. So what exactly does the game do right? Actually, very little. First off, the game has a similar look and feel to Prototype. Now that’s just bonus points right there as everyone who isn’t a communist enjoyed Prototype, but honestly just the ability to be like another game shouldn’t be enough to win people over (and yet we’ve got way too many top selling GTA games that are more or less identical).

“HULK NOT STEAL CARS. HULK STEAL PROTOTYPE IDEA.”

Another cool feature, and this is one of the ways the game differs from Prototype, is levelling up skills. Basically, instead of just getting points that you use to upgrade, you have to perform various tasks, complete certain missions, etc. in order to upgrade abilities. Sure, more high level stuff doesn’t have sensical requirements, but at first it’s kinda nice because usually it will have some relevant to do with development.

The quality overall is also pretty nice. Seriously now, the cutscenes, voice acting, graphics in general, animations, etc. all look nice. On the surface, the game seems like it could really win the average gamer over. You can annihilate the fuck out of everything, it looks and sounds nice, it feels like Prototype…what could go wrong? The first time you’ll notice something’s wrong is when you go to attack.

And so it begins…

You know…in the first level. The Hulk moves around fairly decently, but the attacking is slow and delayed. Enemies can easily dodge and strafe about and sometimes do, if their shit A.I. actually allows them to. You’ll also note early Castlevania style jumping. What do I mean by that? In a lot of games you have full control over your jumping, pitch, direction, height, what have you.

In this game you have VERY LITTLE control over all of these things. Hold down the jump button and release to super jump, otherwise you just jump “normally.” First off, there is no “low” jump for Hulk. Second, if you need to jump in any direction besides straight up, you’ll continue in that direction, even if you need to adjust it. Sure, in the video above the player makes subtle changes in direction by fisting the air, but it can only be done once and barely has any effect.

“HULK NOT CAPABLE OF AERODYNAMIC MANIPULATION!!”

The next problem is the rest of the control system. To be fair, walking is okay, sprinting is a little uncontrollable but that makes sense, grabbing stuff is easy enough, there are really only two attack buttons (when there really only needs to be one), so what exactly is wrong? Grabbing buildings to scale them is a bitch and often doesn’t work or causes you to grab them, then let go like an asshole.

It also doesn’t make any sense why certain control settings are mapped the way they are, like it could’ve been done so much better. For example, you can do a ground pound by hitting Y + X. Okay fine, except why not just dedicate one button to it? X is supposed to be for quick attacks (he’s the Hulk so you know that’s wrong) and Y is supposed to be for any-fucking-day-now slow attacks.

“OMFG why isn’t he attacking?! I hit the attack button like 30 times!”
“…You’re hitting Y, aren’t you?”
“…Yes.”

Why not just have one attack button and a ground pound button? You also use this combination to split apart a car and wear it as gaunlets which, while very cool, could also have been done with just one button. That seems like a trivial complaint until you realize you hit B + Y to use whatever special ability you’ve “equipped.” Yes, equipped. So instead of having well mapped control settings to accomodate the small list of special abilities you acquire, let’s have it always use a combination of buttons AFTER you’ve gone through a small submenu to select them with the D-pad.

This is especially frustrating if you have just enough rage to use ONE ability, need to heal, but accidentally had something else equipped. Furthermore, it’s not as if they gayed up the controller with all kinds of mapped stuff. They didn’t use the LB, L3, or R3 buttons as far as I could tell. So my revised controller scheme would be…

LB – Heal. One block of rage for one block of life. Upgradable.
Y – HULK SMASH. Whatever you’re carrying gets turned into gauntlets, otherwise standard ground smash. If held, will execute HULK SMASH, which requires a set number of rage blocks.
L3 – Sprint.
RB – Thunderclap. When held down does mega thunderclap, which requires a set number of rage blocks.
R3 – TAKE A BIG GREEN FUCKING SHIT.

Two Girls, One Hulk

Seriously, you’d have one left over with that scheme. In fact, theoretically you would still be able to use Y as the slow attack if you wanted the smash to be the R3 button. I mean, I just don’t get it. I really really don’t. But the worst part…THE WORST PART…is the fucking minigames. Okay, the good news is these are entirely optional. Cool, except…thar be achievements in those hills!

Naturally it’s a constant frustration as there’s no midway achievements or anything; it’s all or nothing. It also doesn’t help that some are completely ridiculous like…fucking darts. Worse still, the story starts out kinda mediocre but still interesting and degrades into a ho-hum snorefest. Far be it for me to criticize a story, but when the story is boring, less developed than Borderlands’, and it’s based on a COMIC BOOK CHARACTER, you may have a problem.

Conclusion

The aiming’s shit, most of the controls function like a drunk dung beetle, the story is crap, the A.I. is both terrible and cheap, attacking is very delayed, and were it not viscerally appealing and satisfying to the inner demolitionist, the game would easily be revealed for the giant green turd it is. As it stands I just can’t recommend this game unless you’re an absolute masochist.