I would like to amend my previous glowing review of The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, but only slightly.  It has 27 levels, and 25 of those are full of gleeful joy.

Sadly I am having some difficulty finding appropriate vocabulary to properly convey my sentiments towards the remaining levels, those being the missions “Strange Cargo” and “Endgame”.

“Endgame”, at least, has some rationale for the difficulty spike.  It’s the final level of the game, after all, and final boss fights aren’t supposed to be easy.  In all fairness, the difficulty of the fight wasn’t what made me wonder whether it was possible to accidentally break a “Type S” Xbox controller with pure hate.  Rather, it was the combination of an un-skippable intro cinematic and a slow-motion “you failed” sequence that likewise had to be allowed to play out to its conclusion before you could make another attempt, both of which were just that bit more annoying because most cinematics in the game ARE skippable.

“Strange Cargo”, by contrast, has a skippable intro sequence, which is good because I saw it a LOT.  It’s a mission of a type you see a lot of in the game – you have to infiltrate a heavily guarded military base, grab a doohickey, and escape with the doohickey without damaging it too much.

Yes, the game often asks you, as the Hulk, to carry delicate equipment over long distances.  Don’t examine this too closely.

The only issue with it, really, is that the person who designed the level decided that having an infinite supply of flying enemies with homing missiles chase you while you were carrying the doohickey in question was a GRAND idea, and that getting hit with a homing missile would knock Hulk off his feet and make him drop the doohickey, and that you could in fact get hit with a second missile before you had recovered from the first and perhaps a third before recovering from THAT and so on and so forth.

I cannot help but feel that getting juggled to death by homing missiles is a terribly undignified end for Hulk.

I failed this level a great many times, and it came frightfully close to making me move the game, mentally, to my “well, I’ve seen enough of that” category and physically into the box of “stuff for eBay”.

Still, overall a fantastic game and I suppose that a couple of levels that serve to drive the PLAYER into a state of uncontrollable rage are at least thematically appropriate.