"Free! Free to destroy!" That's what was surging through my brain as I ripped a traffic pole from the street, targeted a lone enemy soldier, and hit a home run, launching him several hundred feet to his bone-shattering demise. This, my friends, is Vivendi Universal's The Incredible Hulk. Developed by Radical Games, this latest Marvel superhero game plops our lumpy green friend into a playground of destruction that makes LucasArts' Mercenaries look like a preschool sand box. It's so much fun that I had trouble putting the DualShock 2 down.

The first Hulk game was all right but it was marred by boring gameplay, particularly anything involving that wimp Bruce Banner. Thankfully, Radical Games has more than addressed this issue by taking his sorry butt and booting him out, meaning you're The Incredible Hulk throughout the entire game, and because he has quite the penchant for destruction, the developers have plopped him into various environments and given you the freedom to annihilate EVERYTHING you see. Seriously, there is nothing in this game that you cannot obliterate. You literally hop from one building to the next leaving giant craters in your wake, and you can smash through walls, shatter windows, blow up cars and then use them as a surfboard/boomerang (a whipped truck will actually spin around and come back to you), and swing tanks around. The game has a very GTA-like feel where you can go anywhere and wreck havoc, and while I can do this for several hours there's also a story buried underneath the mayhem.

Radical is clocking the game's single-player mode at about 30 hours, and while they're not revealing a lot of details about the story at this time, I do know that it's going to be extremely dark, a moment in The Hulk's life where he's wrestling with an evil side of himself that he's trying to get rid of. In his way are legions of enemy soldiers and mutants, including six bosses that will probably be from the comic book series.

Despite this game's intensity and mindless smashing, there's a surprising layer of depth that makes it more than just a mindless beat-em-up. The Hulk has about 150 different moves, and throughout the course of your adventure you'll acquire "smash points" that can be used to purchase new ones. There are also several areas to explore that are contained within two major locations, the Bad Lands and the Cityscape, and I'm pretty sure that Radical will load them up with goodies to locate. Also, it's probably safe to assume that there will be quite a few unlockable goodies, possibly comic book covers and interviews.

Next to swinging around in Spiderman 2, The Incredible Hulk, even though I only spent about 15 minutes with the game, is the most fun that I've had with a superhero adventure title in a long time, and I wasn't even doing any of its missions. I was having a blast leveling the city and causing havoc, though it seems like the game's running a little faster than it should. I understand that The Hulk's surprisingly nimble for his size, but in the build that I played he was quicker than a hiccup, and the PS2 version was a little choppy. Hopefully this'll all be ironed out before the final build's released.

Graphically the game looks pretty sweet. The city I romped around in is huge, and there's a lot going on below the skyscrapers. There's traffic and pedestrians to watch out for, though from what I was told you may not be able to actually hurt civilians that are walking about, though on the flip side that makes little sense when you consider that those cars The Hulk's picking up and smashing into buildings theoretically contain innocent people. However, the less you think about the logic behind the game the better, because it's a lot of fun putting your brain on the back burner and just enjoying the well done explosions and Hulk character animation.

I'm totally down with The Incredible Hulk. Its GTA "go anywhere" style of play coupled with its awesome special effects make it stand out more than other games in its genre, and it may catapult The Hulk into the spotlight, which of course means tons of spin-off games for him. Just be sure not to rip through your clothes in anticipation of The Incredible Hulk's summer release.