You know for as long as Godzilla has been around, i.e. 1954, you’d think I would have seen even one of the thirty or so Godzilla movies out there. To be blunt, the Godzilla universe has never really appealed to me, but there’s no doubt that Godzilla and his Kaiju buddies have delighted and thrilled B-movie fans for years. The Godzilla I am most familiar with is actually the obscure Hanna Barbera and Toho cartoon from the late 70s — still a great cartoon.
Anyway, in the past week, I have become familiar with the latest Godzilla videogame. Making a Godzilla game has its obvious challenges, but you can count on there being at least one major gameplay element: destruction. If it’s destruction and fan service you seek, Godzilla does provide that in spades. The problem is, the gameplay suffers from major repetition and it’s just not all that fun. The game is not broken, though, despite feeling and looking pretty rough. An 800MB patch in the last few days probably did a lot to help that. Let’s have a closer look.
At first launch, I was surprised to see how many different game modes were included. The story mode is called God of Destruction mode, and within it you battle through some twenty stages, growing the size of Godzilla steadily as you consume more and more G-Energy. As the in-game cutscenes explain, when Godzilla first surfaced, scientists were able to make the most of a bad situation by discovering what became known as G-Energy. This source of power that Godzilla drew upon was harvested and commercialized to the point where humanity greatly benefited from it for the next six decades. The problem is, Godzilla has awoken from his sixty year slumber and he’s hungry for the very G-Energy that has been created and used in the cities. Controlling Godzilla, you’ll come ashore and seek out the numerous G-Energy generators scattered about the city, destroying whatever lies in your way in order to destroy the generators themselves.
The premise couldn’t be simpler, and the execution does not stray far from simplicity either. The HUD however is surprisingly busy, with a mini-map that shows you the locations of the generators, your health meter, temperature gauge, destruction level, and several other items. Similar to games like Hulk Ultimate Destruction and Prototype, the more havoc you cause, the greater the damage or threat level, and thus the response from the military. For the most part, the military’s actions are pretty tepid, at least when playing through the stages in Easy and Normal mode. The structure of this mode often includes two branching paths that you can take in which the current leader of the city (which cycles between three different characters) decides how quickly and aggressively they’re going to react. The bigger threat lies in the surprise visits from other Kaiju, including the likes of Mechagodzilla, Rodan, King Ghidorah, and many more. Even if you destroy the generators, you still have to face off with the Kaiju, and for me that was the biggest threat for mission failure, although it wasn’t a huge concern. There no checkpoints though, so if you die, you start the mission over.
Missions are generally under ten minutes and do have some secondary objectives that you can go for if you’d like. These range from destroying x number of a certain type of enemy, like nineteen tanks, to finding all of the data items. Along the way you’ll unlock more points and thing to upgrade Godzilla and other Kaiju, and upgrade your general rank as well which can be shared on leaderboards. There are a lot of locked Kaiju and fan service items to uncover as you play. While the missions are short, they really blend together and boredom is almost bound to set in, to the point to where I was playing Godzilla in twenty to thirty minute bursts.
Other gameplay modes include King of Kaiju in which you battle a half dozen or so randomized Kaiju one after another. To start with, you can only play as the modern Godzilla or the one from 1964. The Vs Mode allows you to connect with up to two others to do battle. In limited testing, this mode works well and it’s not bad, but I’m still not hooked on the core gameplay. You also have Evolution mode which is fairly involved. From here you can upgrade Godzilla, Rodan, Mechagodzilla, Battra, and Godzilla (1964). This mode comes across as a bit more cumbersome than it needed to be, but by meeting the criteria you can get perks like reducing the amount of time it takes to fill up the Breath Gauge and enabling 180 degree turning, which is quite nice for handling Kaiju battles as turning is otherwise pretty clunky and slow. Eventually, the Diorama mode unlocks in which you can create your own scenarios and a detailed Kaiju guide should please fans with its vast information base.
While Godzilla has more modes and even more depth than I would have expected out of a game based upon the famous monster, the core issue for me is that it’s just not very fun nor rewarding to play. Confined stages, slow movements and difficulty aiming your attacks, and just a general clunky feel (even if by design) act as a blanket issue for the game, regardless of mode. I’m not saying I have a better design idea, but I think something more nimble and faster paced would have been more enjoyable. Of course the appeal of the Godzilla franchise is giant monsters doing giant destructive things, but the scale of this does not feel — nor look — impressive in Godzilla. On that note, graphically it’s very underwhelming and reminded me of last gen visuals, and the audio is similarly underwhelming and repetitive.
What’s left is a game that functions and has more depth and modes than anyone might have expected, but it’s just not a whole lot of fun to play. Granted, it’s hard for someone to dive into a franchise that they don’t already like — I have the same issue with a variety of other IPs, be they videogames like Madden and HALO to movies and so forth. My point being, if you enjoy Godzilla, this is not an awful game, and you’re likely going to be able to tolerate and overlook some of the issues I had simply because it’s a Godzilla game. However in my situation, what’s offered just isn’t enough to keep me playing.
To the summary…
