The Incredible Hulk

Every skyscraper in this Manhattan can be climbed hand over hand, punched until the concrete spalls away, and eventually brought down in a heap of dust and rebar. That single idea carries the whole thing. Edge of Reality built the 2008 movie tie-in on the bones of Radical's Ultimate Destruction, keeping the wall-scaling and the sense that no piece of the skyline is scenery, and the PS2 version still gets that part right more often than it has any business doing on hardware this old.

The problem is what surrounds it. Missions cycle through a short list: escort a vehicle, smash a set number of targets, protect something fragile from soldiers who exist mainly to be swatted. Rage builds as you fight and unlocks heavier attacks, and there is real satisfaction in grabbing a taxi, folding it around a fist and using it as a glove for the next thirty seconds. But the structure never complicates itself. By the third or fourth hour you have seen the full vocabulary and the city has stopped surprising you.

Sega's tie-in schedule shows in the presentation. The PS2 build runs at a noticeably lower fidelity than its Xbox 360 and PS3 siblings, with a draw distance that keeps most of Manhattan as a grey suggestion until you are on top of it, and a frame rate that sags whenever a tower actually comes apart. Pedestrians are placeholders. The story, tracking the Norton film loosely, is delivered in clipped cutscenes that assume you already know who Emil Blonsky is.

What holds up is the physicality. Hulk has real weight here — the landing animations, the way momentum carries him a few steps past where you stopped pushing, the shoulder-first charge through a bus stop. Boss fights against Abomination and the odder comic pulls the developers slipped in are slugging matches rather than pattern puzzles, and they are better for it. There is also a decent amount to find scattered across the map for players who want a reason to keep leaping.

As a licensed game made to a release date it is far from the worst of its kind, and it is genuinely more generous than most. As a sequel to Ultimate Destruction it is a smaller, blunter object. Give it an evening and it does the one thing it was built to do: it lets you take a building apart with your hands and watch the street fill with it.