The Incredible Hulk - Ultimate Destruction

Tear a city bus in half, jam a fist into each hollow end, and go to work on a tank. That move is not a scripted set piece or a cutscene flourish. It is an item on a menu, bought with points earned from wrecking things, and once you own it every bus on the map becomes ammunition. Radical Entertainment built an entire open-world game on that principle, and it remains one of the cleverest uses of a superhero licence the sixth generation produced.

The structure is simple enough. Bruce Banner is hunted across desert towns and a sprawling city by a military outfit and a rival gorilla-strong antagonist, and the story is serviceable rather than memorable. What matters is the shop. Ultimate Destruction treats Hulk's moveset as a catalogue of unlocks, and each purchase changes how the world reads. Learn to grip metal and a car becomes a weapon you can fold, throw or ride. Learn wall-running and every skyscraper turns into a road. The upgrade list is long, and unusually for the era almost nothing in it is filler.

Movement is the part that has aged best. Hulk vaults across rooftops and thumps down streets with a weight that most traversal systems of the period could not manage, and the game rarely stops you to load. Ripping a door off a car and surfing it down a boulevard still feels like something nobody else thought to put in a game. The city itself is plain by modern standards, low on detail and thin on incident between missions, but it is built to be destroyed rather than admired, and the physics hold up under punishment.

Combat is the weaker half. Enemy variety runs out before the campaign does, and the later boss fights lean on damage sponges in a way that drags. Some collectible hunts feel like padding bolted onto a game that did not need it. None of that undoes the central pleasure, which is a set of tools so generous that players kept finding combinations the designers presumably never planned.

Radical would recycle this template into Prototype three years later with a darker skin and a nastier protagonist, and the lineage is obvious from the first minute. This is the purer version, though, because the licence gave it a reason to be joyful. A green man throwing a helicopter at another helicopter needs no further justification.