For how little is going on, you'd expect load times to be few and far between, right? Wrong again. That was all done years earlier in War of the Monsters and apparently stayed there. You can grab the occasional small building and throw it at someone, but forget about scaling buildings, leaping here and there, tossing tanker trucks at each other, or impaling one another on antennas or the like. Environmental interaction hardly exists, either. Fluid gameplay is also hampered a bit by stiff combo animations that you often get stuck watching on auto-pilot once your target has sidestepped it, opening you up wide to unavoidable attacks. The title runs fairly well as long as you're way out on the outskirts of the play area and far from the action, but charging into town where two or more brutes are slugging it out would have you believing that horrible, game-crippling slowdown was a super-move just used against you. I'm willing to make concessions for sub-par graphics if the gameplay is smooth and the frame rate never falters, but neither is true here. Forget particle effects or alpha blending the look here is partying like it's 1999. If the camera zooms far enough above, the cities look laughably small and sparse. Rather, they simply instantly transform into flat, 2D sprites of a vomitous-looking smear on the ground. Stepping on cars or trains doesn't smash them, cause explosions or scatter debris. Buildings don't crumble to rubble or fall on top of monsters and kill them they just sink into the ground and disappear. The exact opposite is true of Godzilla Unleashed, as every screen I've seen looks vastly better than the retail release on my high-def screen. Oftentimes, especially with next-gen games, screenshots don't do them justice and you really need to see things in motion to appreciate what a game's visuals have to offer. I had to check to be sure the disc wasn't somehow playing in my PS1 because of all the low-res, repetitive textures, and I could count on one hand the polygons used to render Big Ben in the heart of London proper. Monsters need room to do their thing.įrom there, we go to the pitiful environmental geometry and effects. The barriers need to be more visible and further apart. The invisible barriers around each city are vastly more effective at containing the critters than all the shields on Monster Island were, and you'll sometimes get cornered against one without really knowing it. Sure, a 50-foot monster isn't going to squeeze neatly between skyscrapers, but that's not really the issue. Scant landmarks would have sufficed, but the levels are not only painfully bland to look at, but they also feel cramped.
I can accept that the PS2 can't render accurately the entirety of any one of these cities. This is the first of many letdowns in Godzilla Unleashed. It can also be said that no part of this game's world looks remotely good, either. Several real (though not realistic) cities get involved, from typhoons in Tokyo to lava spills in Seattle, chaos stretching from San Francisco to London to Sydney no part of the world is safe. The initial barrage of crystal-carrying meteors destabilizes the shields that are penning up the beasties on Monster Island, allowing them to roam around the world in search of these crystals.
Story mode revolves around an alien race seeding the Earth with giant crystals that suck up energy and attract our titular band of monsters due to their own radioactive natures. The option to toggle between English and Japanese speech is nice, and may be partly to blame for this incongruity, but come on, people. Story mode is typically cheesy in keeping with its cinematic heritage, but it, like the rest of the game, isn't without flaws the first and most evident flaw is that the subtitles often fall a page/speaker or two behind the actual spoken dialogue during story-laden interludes. There's a drawn-out story mode in Godzilla Unleashed, alongside a more straightforward brawl mode, where you just jump in with up to four players and battle it out, destroying quite a bit of the surroundings in the process. Curse of the licensed content? Seems like it. Despite relying more on look-alikes than actual licensed characters, both of these games are superior to the mess that is Godzilla Unleashed. I still remember pumping a whole pocketful of quarters into Neo Geo's classic King of the Monsters in the arcades years ago, and more recently wasted many enjoyable hours with Incog's awesome (and similarly titled) War of the Monsters.
As a longtime fan of monster fighting games, I went into this review with an open and even optimistic mind.
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