The Incredible Hulk: Rampage

Forget about bears with sore heads, alley cats fighting over the last fishbone, or even a woman recently scorned. When it comes to being angry, there's one particular person who eclipses them all. With his big, bulging eyes and a slightly off-colour complexion, the Incredible Hulk has had more than his fair share of tantrums.

And they continue apace here, in The Incredible Hulk: Rampage, which pairs the supposed good guy, and Hulk alter ego, Dr. Bruce Banner, against another victim of gamma radiation (there's a nasty case of it going around, apparently), Samuel Sterns.

Whereas Dr. Banner turns into our noble green hero, Sterns develops a brain five times its normal size, enabling him to telepathically control the minds of the population at large. Which does make it seem like Hulk got the short straw, especially when you consider the amount of puzzles that have to be solved in this particular game.

Viewed from above, The Incredible Hulk: Rampage demands you manoeuvre the mean green through a series of obstacle-filled levels. Progress is dependent on equal parts problem-solving (not the Hulk's forte) and more familiar smashing of soldiers, tanks and just about anything else that gets in your way.

That is, unless you've turned back into the timid Bruce Banner, in which case you'll stick to using the computers and squeezing through tight gaps, doing your best not to break a nail. Switching between the two, while not something you can do at will – you need to find specific icons in each level to trigger the change – does add an extra dimension to the action. Or at least that's how the theory goes.

In practise, we can't help thinking the feature could have been used a little more imaginatively. Rather than offering a dynamic approach to problem-solving or a chance to tackle the same problem in different ways, the game too frequently descends into repetitive back-tracking to these 'changing rooms' in order to solve a problem. This is hardly helped by the feeling that most missions are essentially the same, just set in a different location. Surely such drudgery and déjà vu would be enough to tame even the wildest irradiated humanoid?

Admittedly the battle action does offer some respite, with the ability to simply smash guards in the chops or (our favourite option) pick them up and hurl them in the general direction of their cowering colleagues. Yet even this can get repetitive and would have been so much more exciting with the odd special move or power-up thrown in.

Whilst there's nothing fundamentally wrong with The Incredible Hulk: Rampage, there's nothing particularly incredible about it either (apart perhaps from the Marvel-lous animation and wonderful sound effects).

Neither the Banner/Hulk transformation nor the sheer destructive power of the angry one is really exploited to the full, ensuring the whole experience rapidly feels rather restrained, repetitive and ever so slightly dull. The Mildly Peeved Bloke: Grumble, anyone?