A playthrough of U.S. Gold's 1994 licensed-based platforming beat 'em up for the SNES, The Incredible Hulk.
Played through on the hard difficulty level.
Like so many other popular Marvel franchises, The Incredible Hulk received his own game at the height of the 16-bit consoles' popularity. And like many other adaptations of the time, it's far from brilliant, but it's decent enough to provide a solid afternoon's entertainment.
In order to track down The Leader, The Hulk marches his burly self through half a dozen stages, uppercutting, pile driving, and generally brutalizing everything that crosses his path like a psychotic pro wrestler.
The levels are made up of mazes of branching hallways filled with tons of unpleasant thing looking to do you harm, but you have a sizable range of moves at your disposal, as well as the ability to pick up and throw things like boulders, phone booths, and cars. You have to be careful about your condition, though: once he's taken some damage, The Hulk loses his most powerful moves (and you really don't want to lose the Sonic Boom Hand Clap, believe me!), and if he takes further damage, he'll revert to his Bruce Banner form. While in his normal human form, ol' Brucie is virtually defenseless, but it can be useful when you want to sneak by the enemy unharmed or to enter passageways that The Hulk is too big to otherwise enter.
Though it's gaudy and cheesy looking, the graphics are pretty good for a SNES game. They look fairly similar in style to some other games that blend pre-rendered CG sprites with traditional pixel art (like ClayMates, Harley's Humongous Adventure, and Doom Troopers), and there's some nice attention to detail and color. (We also have the font from the Genesis Mortal Kombat game thrown in for whatever reason.) The audio fares about the same as the visuals. The music is of good quality, but it's laughably tacky in how it vacillates between porn funk and techno.
The gameplay is where things start to come apart, though. Like I said before, it plays well enough, but it has a few major issues. The controls suffer from a nasty amount of input lag, and many of the special move input sequences are unintuitively mapped to the controller. The level design needed a lot more variety, as well. You know those mazes made of plastic tubes that you can buy for hamsters? Many of these levels make you feel like you're the hamster.
The Incredible Hulk is a game that would've made for an ideal rental if you were into the character. It's not too difficult, everything generally works the way it's supposed to, and it provides some reasonable entertainment. That's not the most enthusiastic endorsement I've ever given a game, I know, but The Incredible Hulk on SNES is neither great nor awful, but decent.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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