YMMV / The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction

• Cry for the Devil: While the game shows Blonsky doing a lot of terrible things in his pursuit of the Hulk, over the course of the game we also see his mutation is slowly causing him to lose his mind. By the end of the game, he has lost everything and even admitted the power he used to enjoy isn't worth everything he has lost.
• Demonic Spiders: The Combat Wardens. They're fast, they can dodge projectiles, they'll smash into you while you're in midair, and they'll generally make your life hell if you're not careful.
• Difficulty Spike: The missions at the start of the game are relatively tame, but the difficulty is ratcheted up when you have to defend a building from swarms of tanks. And it only gets tougher from there.
• Fridge Horror: Blonsky has the local nuclear power plant destroyed and at the end of the game as the Abomination he destroys the hydroelectric dam. This likely means the city has no electricity.
  • Blonsky uses the Division to set up a state of martial law. Imagine what it's like for the civilians with the army walking the streets, on top of living in fear of the Hulk.
• Goddamn Bats: The MLRS units always seem to have a missile ready to interrupt all your attempts at pulling off cool combos. Fortunately, you eventually gain the ability to catch missiles and send them right back.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Banner's Opening Narration has him compare himself to a ticking bomb. In The Avengers one of his lines is "We're not a team, we're a time bomb."
  • The game's portrayal of the Devil Hulk lines up depressingly well with how the character would later be fleshed out in Immortal Hulk, and replaying the game after reading that comic makes his scenes a lot more sad; he isn't evil, he's a protector alter that is just trying to defend Bruce and be the loving father that Brian Banner never was, but is twisted into an angry monster because Bruce was so traumatized by his dad's abuse that he can barely even conceive of a good father. The creepy speeches, the violent lashing out at the world, the constant attempts to take control... it's all done out of misguided love for Bruce.
  Bruce please I only meant to...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: All the reviews raving about how the game makes you feel like the Hulk are probably the same people raving about how Spider-Man (PS4) makes you feel like Spider-Man.
• Inferred Holocaust: Blonsky has a nuclear power plant blown up to keep Mercy from talking. The loss of power to the city isn't addressed. At the end of the game, while Hulk stops the Abomination from flooding the city, but the ending doesn't address the city's other power plant being destroyed.
• It Was His Sled: You don't need to know much about the cast of characters around Hulk in the comics to recognize Blonsky's name and be able to predict how he will end up.
• Jerkass Woobie: Blonsky. He's trying to kill you and will go to any lengths to do it, while being a jerk to anybody who gets in his way. But over the course of the game he's shown to be suffering thanks to his gamma mutation and the danger of the Abomination taking over. In the end it turns out the whole big secret he was keeping in Mission Directive was that he was trying to find a way to save his wife the whole time, and he failed on top of losing everything else.
• Moral Event Horizon: Blonsky might be trying to save his wife for most of the game, but at the end when he's seen he's failed, he decides to cause a flash flood to destroy a major city, just to make Banner suffer. It promptly becomes painfully clear he's now beyond saving.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • When it stops being terrifying, the Devil Hulk's voice is a spectacular guttural sound courtesy of Richard Moll.
  • The whooshing sound effect heard whenever pressing Start after a loading screen, or completing a mission.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The game has an outstanding combat engine, an entertaining story, and a design team that knew their source material and weren't afraid to make use of it. Many critics said that the game actually succeeded in making them feel like the Hulk.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Despite some interesting ideas, the story is generally seen as the weakest aspect of the game. Luckily, the gameplay itself more than makes up for it.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: To Radical's earlier movie tie-in game Hulk. No longer restrained by movie licensing limits, it also removed several Scrappy Mechanic from that game, such as stealth sections with a de-powered Bruce Banner, and made the game into a bigger Wide-Open Sandbox with Hulk's powers available at all times.
• Tear Jerker: The mission briefing "Hell Hath No Fury." Samson calls Banner saying he needs to stop the Abomination. To his horror, Banner isn't responding. He gets so desperate that in the briefing for "Endgame" he sends his message to the Hulk instead, begging him to stall the Abomination until the city can be evacuated.
• That One Boss:
  • General Ross in the Hulkbuster Titan mech. For starts, you can never hit him directly for long, as he will activate a shield which bounces you back. His arsenal is some of the most damaging in the game, such as a homing concentrated laser and enormous missiles which can deplete your health to half or less. The most efficient way to damage Ross is by throwing tanks at him, and even that only fully works if there are no buildings obscuring the way, and Ross is close enough to get hit.
  • The Devil Hulk isn't as insane as the preceding, due to the simple strategy of the fight, but the lack of sizable health pickups and his extremely high damage output (his ground smash and body slam attacks will chop off two thirds of your health each) will likely result in a couple retries.
• That One Level: "Protect and Serve", "Lockdown", "Strange Cargo" and "Freedom's Swansong" all come to mind.
• Tough Act to Follow: The game was so well made that The Incredible Hulk (2008) tried its best to follow on its footsteps.

---