Some franchises just don't make good games; Godzilla is one such franchise. Godzilla and his brethren are slow; their strength lies in their innate ability to absorb damage while stomping on tanks and spitting fire at foes. Neither "agile" nor "aptitude for combos" appear on Godzilla's resume, and anybody present in a fighting game needs one or the other, if not both.

Fighting games aren't known for their story, and there's a reason. They're usually composed of things like this; "a bunch of crystals have appeared, and now there are monsters coming out of them; help us Godzilla!" Godzilla and his buddies make up the Earth Defenders and through the story mode they tangle with the Global Defense Force (featuring Mechagodzilla because one giant lizard just isn't enough), the Aliens, and the Mutants. Each faction is made up of five or six monsters, but it doesn't matter because once you choose a combatant for story mode you're stuck with it. You can play through again as different monsters, but being able to switch it up between fights or stages (a la X-Men Next Dimension) throughout the story mode would have been nice.

Each fight pits your chosen monster against three foes and requirements for victory range from "defeat all enemies" to "destroy all crystals" to "defeat all enemies or destroy all crystals." This is fine as fighting games don't need goals like "hack the mainframe" and "score 500 more points than Tony Hawk at half-pipe," but when stages have victory conditions the player should be told what they are at the beginning of the stage. As it is here, you need to pause the game to find out how to win. Too little attention was paid to the details here, and it brings the entire package down.

Mechanically, Godzilla Unleashed falls short. Each monster has a stable of three attacks: punch, kick, and ranged. Three of these attacks can be chained together into a combo, and the environments can be used to your advantage. After all, it hurts more to fall onto an electrical transformer than to fall onto the street. More depth would be appreciated here though. It's just not fun to throw the same punch over and over again. Fighting games retain an audience through their depth and their range of valid strategies. With such a crippled move set the strategies available to the player are too few to warrant playing Godzilla Unleashed for very long.

Godzilla Unleashed is an obvious cash grab hoping to rake in some holiday profits on name recognition alone. Even the most ardent of Godzilla fans will tire of the shallow mechanics, plodding pace, and dated graphics. There are better fighters out there, and you should play one of them instead of Godzilla Unleashed.

Jan 13, 2008 | 0 comments
Justin Last