Radical Entertainment did something weird in 2005. They actually understood the Hulk. Most developers look at a character with infinite strength and think "beat 'em up," but the team behind The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction realized that playing as Bruce Banner’s alter ego shouldn't feel like a choreographed dance. It should feel like an insurance liability.
It’s been over two decades. We’ve had the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe rise and peak. We’ve had high-budget Avengers titles and open-world Spider-Man games that look like movies. Yet, if you ask any veteran gamer about the "feel" of being a powerhouse, they’ll almost always point you back to a PlayStation 2 or GameCube disc.
The Philosophy of "Unstoppable"
Control is a funny thing in game design. Usually, developers want to limit you so the game stays challenging. In The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the challenge wasn't about surviving; it was about how much of the environment you could weaponize before the military sent in the Hulkbusters.
You aren't just walking down a street. You’re sprinting up the side of a skyscraper, your feet carving massive craters into the glass and steel with every stride. When you reach the top, you don't just jump; you launch. The sound design—a mix of metallic groans and concussive blasts—sold the weight of the character in a way that modern games often miss.
Eric Holmes, the lead designer, famously pushed for a "fully realized" movement system. He wanted players to feel the momentum. If you’ve played it, you remember the "Shield Grind." You could literally rip a city bus in half, use the two pieces as giant metal roller skates, and grind down a main thoroughfare, crushing everything in your path. It was ridiculous. It was chaotic. It was exactly what a Hulk game needed to be.
Weaponizing the World
Everything was a tool. This wasn't just marketing fluff.
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Take a simple taxi cab. In a standard sandbox game, it’s an obstacle or a vehicle. Here? You could jump on it, flatten it into a pancake, and then use it as a massive frisbee to take out a helicopter. Or, better yet, you could "steel-fist" it. The Hulk would punch his hands through a couple of cars and suddenly he had giant, improvised boxing gloves that increased his damage output.
- Environmental Interaction: You could grab a cow in the badlands and toss it. Why? Because you could.
- The Sonic Clap: A move that didn't just hurt enemies but cleared the entire screen of debris and glass.
- The Atomic Slam: A vertical drop that felt like it was going to reset your console.
The game didn't care about "balance" in the traditional sense. It cared about the power fantasy. This is a nuance that modern live-service games often lose. They’re so worried about the player being "overpowered" that they forget that being overpowered is the entire point of certain characters.
Why the Open World Worked Without the Fluff
We live in an era of "map bloat." You open a map in a modern Ubisoft or Sony game and you're blinded by icons. Collectibles, side quests, towers, radio stations. It's exhausting.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction had two main hubs: the City and the Badlands. They weren't the biggest maps ever made. Honestly, by today's standards, they’re tiny. But they were dense. More importantly, they were destructible.
Radical Entertainment used a "layering" system for destruction. When you hit a building, it didn't just vanish or swap to a "broken" model. It showed specific damage where you impacted it. You could see the rebar. You could see the concrete crumbling. For 2005 hardware, this was a technical miracle.
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The story, penned by veteran Hulk writer Paul Jenkins, actually gave Bruce Banner a reason to be doing all this. It wasn't just mindless smashing. You had the Abomination. You had General "Thunderbolt" Ross. You even had the psychological element of Banner trying to build a machine to cure himself while the Hulk just wanted to be left alone. It grounded the mayhem.
The Mechanical Legacy
Look at Prototype. If you’ve ever played that game and thought, "Wow, this feels familiar," it's because Radical Entertainment took the engine and the movement physics from Ultimate Destruction and gave them a gore-soaked makeover. The way Alex Mercer runs up walls is almost a direct port of how the Hulk moved.
Even the modern Marvel’s Spider-Man games owe a debt to this title. The fluid transition from ground movement to wall-running to aerial traversal? That was pioneered here. Before this game, most superhero titles felt clunky. You were either flying (which usually felt like swimming in air) or walking. Ultimate Destruction introduced the "sprint-jump-charge" loop that makes you feel like a living projectile.
The Voice of the Beast
We have to talk about Fred Tatasciore. While many actors have played the Hulk, Tatasciore’s performance in this game became the gold standard. He didn't just roar; he sounded like a tectonic plate shifting. Combined with Neal McDonough as Bruce Banner, the vocal chemistry made the mid-mission cutscenes actually worth watching instead of skipping.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Difficulty
There’s a misconception that this game was a "button masher."
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If you try to button-mash your way through the later boss fights or the high-tier Hulkbuster encounters, you’ll get pulverized. The game actually had a surprisingly deep combo system. You had to learn how to juggle enemies. You had to learn the timing of the "Critical Mass" moves—super-attacks you could only trigger when your health (or rage) reached a certain threshold.
The "Code Blue" strikes were legit terrifying. When the military really got fed up with you, they’d send in specialized units that could actually stun-lock the Hulk. You had to play strategically, using the environment for cover, which is a weird thing to say about a Hulk game. But that's the brilliance of it. It made you feel powerful, but not immortal.
Actionable Steps for Modern Play
If you’re looking to revisit this masterpiece or experience it for the first time, you can't just buy it on Steam. It’s a relic of a complicated licensing era between Universal, Marvel, and Vivendi.
- Hunt the Physical Discs: The PlayStation 2 version is the most common, but the Xbox version actually runs at a higher resolution and has better frame stability. If you have an original Xbox or a 360 with backwards compatibility, that's the "pro" way to play.
- Emulation is Your Friend: PC players usually turn to PCSX2 (PS2) or Dolphin (GameCube). The GameCube version via Dolphin is incredibly stable and allows for internal resolution scaling that makes the game look like a modern indie title.
- Check the Moveset: Don't just follow the story. Spend your "Smash Points" on the movement upgrades first. The game gets 100% better once you unlock the ability to air-dash and elbow-drop from the stratosphere.
- Ignore the Graphics: Yeah, it's 2005. The textures on the pedestrians look like thumbprints. It doesn't matter. Within five minutes of leaping over a skyscraper, you won't care.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction remains the blueprint. It understood that a superhero game isn't about the cape or the costume—it's about the physics of power. Until a developer is willing to let us turn a city bus into a pair of sneakers again, this game will keep its crown.