New Hulk game for summer 2005

Vivendi have announced the first details of a new Hulk game for PS2, Xbox and Gamecube. Called simply The Incredible Hulk, the title is currently being developed by Radical Games - also the people behind last year's The Hulk.

The action-adventure will offer fully destructible environments while the Hulk will have the ability to (wait for it) "weaponise any object". The free-roaming landscapes allow players to jump anywhere, climb anything and smash everything - even entire buildings. We're also promised epic boss fights and a slew of additional side missions.

For a further inside into the game, we caught up recently with the game's lead designer Eric Holmes...

What are the key ways in which the new game will improve over last year's The Hulk?
A guideline for our gameplay in this new game was 'action on the Richter scale'. If game content didn't measure up to that, we didn't do it. Hulk doesn't save kittens out of trees, he rips the tree out of the ground and uses it to blow a helicopter to pieces. That's the scale we're talking about in this game. It's a major expansion of the Hulk experience and is much broader in scope, allowing the player to direct the action across a free-roaming world. It's quite different to anything out there.

Have you sorted out the camera system?
We have an entirely new camera system to cope with our entirely new gameplay. Hulk's amazing movement abilities demanded it. Hulk has a full representation of his powers in this game: you can execute epic jumps of 20 storeys high, climb skyscrapers, wall-run and basically traverse the entire landscape with ease.

The Banner missions were regarded as being a bit dull in the last game. How have you addressed this?
They don't exist. Banner is used to move the story forward. He's voiced by Neal McDonough (Minority Report, Medical Investigation, Walking Tall), who does a great job. Hulk is the lynchpin of gameplay action. We think that people buying a Hulk game want to focus on the Hulk and, due to all the extra moves and features we could add by focusing on Hulk alone, we decided that was the way to go. Hulk has a vast array of unique abilities and we wanted to spend as much effort as we could in making the game stand out due to what he can achieve.

In what way has the combat system been changed and what new special attacks will the Hulk have?
Hulk's move-set has grown enormously. We've remapped the controls to allow Hulk more flexibility in combos - no more punch-punch-punch repetition. The Hulk is versatile and fast - he can flow into just about any move, any time. The scale of the moves has been stepped up considerably. Hulk's jump was only around three metres high in the previous Hulk title - now he can jump around 20 storeys high. This leads to bigger worlds and faster movement, so all of our moves had to be ranged up too. Hulk is still a monster fighter up close but we also focussed on adding shockwave-style techniques to the gameplay so that the player can affect enemies and objects at a range. The result is dynamic fighting on a scale you won't get anywhere else.

Finally, weaponisation! This is a feature we're very proud of. Just like in the previous game, Hulk can pick up and interact with anything in the world. This time, Hulk can use his enormous size and strength to rip, crush and tear objects in the world to create new objects with different functionality. An example would be picking up a car: sure, you can smash people over the head with it but you can also rip it in two to create two giant steel boxing gloves. It's a sight to behold and something that's totally Hulk.

We've also expanded our training resources to make sure that players understand all the moves in the game. There's also a full unlockable move system tied to Smash Points, our scoring mechanism for the game. This means the player gets rewarded for doing anything Hulk-like and can then buy new moves.

Will there be any new versions of the Hulk character included in the game?
That's something you're going to have to play the game to find out...

The Incredible Hulk will be released for PS2, Xbox and Gamecube in the summer