Review: Disastrous 'Godzilla' stomps all over itself
A few hours into Godzilla, I’m engaged in what should be an absolutely epic monster-on-monster melee. As the iconic beast, I'm belly-deep in the ocean trading blows with King Ghidora. With a stretching skyline in the distance, military strikes raining down from above, and my three-headed opponent against the ropes, the stage is set for a battle worthy of the King of the Monsters.
Except that the ropes are literal: We’re artificially penned-in by an ugly rectangular outline.
That’s just one of the ways Bandai Namco's video game take on the fire-breathing baddie for the PS3 and PS4 is off base. Much like the game's idiotic, gung-ho military that are convinced they can stop Godzilla, I was continuously fooled by cool concepts ultimately sullied by awkward implementation, fun-halting flaws, and bad design choices. While Japan's government remained clueless — shocked till the very end that Godzilla was coming for their precious G-Energy — I smartened up much sooner.
Following a brief cinematic of Godzilla coming ashore to tear Japan a new one, players take the reigns of the main monster himself, reducing buildings to rubble and beating up power generators. Or you'll try to, at least. Godzilla's speed feels about right considering his size, but that doesn’t make controlling the big lizard particularly fun.
Godzilla can swipe his long tail, swat his stubby arms, charge like a linebacker, and barbecue baddies with his atomic breath. Torching enemies should be a blast, but that's rarely the case here because the ranged attack has only two possible destinations: Straight ahead, and wherever the hell it wants. Turning Godzilla is like steering an ocean liner, weirdly requiring the use of the gamepad’s trigger buttons. It’s inexact and exceedingly slow.
Toss in the fact that the breath weapon is tied to the same cool-down meter as a totally unexplained invincibility/lightning strike, and unleashing the beast's most iconic ability becomes more frustrating than fun.
Utilizing this mixed bag of attacks, players work through stages by destroying generators and battling party-crashing Kaiju. That’s a high point; Godzilla'simpressive stable of monsters means you’ll go toe-to-talon with iconic uglies from Mothra to MechaGodzilla. When you’re not getting tanks stuck between Godzilla's toes or evading SpaceGodzilla's erupting spikes, you can try to meander over to a few ‘data collection’ points, which means viewing the destruction from a distance through a video feed while continuing to crush vehicles like empty beer cans. On top of unlocking later stages, collecting this footage gives a real sense of Godzilla's enormous size.
Theoretically, his size fluctuates. Smashing things coughs up something called 'G-Power', which, according to the game, makes Godzilla grow in size and power. Except it doesn't. The various flashing HUD elements indicate Godzilla is getting bigger and stronger, but it doesn’t look or feel like it at all.
Another dead-on-arrival idea is the campaign's branching paths. After each short, tiny stage, players can choose to take an easy, normal, or hard route. A political leader is assigned to deal with Godzilla; the easy path might see a passive politician sympathize with the monstrous threat, while a more hard-nosed official won't hesitate to order a “full-metal missile” strike. It's an interesting feature that should shape both the narrative and difficulty, but like so many of the game's promising ideas, tougher levels mostly just means tougher Kaiju. It barely makes a difference.
The same can be said for the upgrades. Defeating other iconic Kaiju earns points that can be applied to Godzilla's skills; teach Mothra some manners, for example, and you might be able to decrease the time it takes to refill that stupid atomic breath meter or add a bit more sass to your tail swing. You can't apply these perks, however, until your next story mode play-through.
Which brings me to Godzilla's most glaring flaw: Its God of Destruction campaign mode must be tackled multiple times to unlock everything the game has to offer. So by the time you've upgraded your towering terror with the best city-leveling abilities, you'll be too bored to use them.
This sort of artificial padding usually means a game is short on content. That's not entirely the case here. Godzilla has plenty of modes, but fully experiencing each means first needlessly crushing countless generators, beating the same Kaiju over and over again, and watching hundreds of structures fall in the same generic display of sparks, smoke, and fire. It's a cycle that becomes even more tedious when you consider the bugs (camera clipping, collision detection), bland color palette, and lack of personality that infect each level.
It's little consolation that most of the modes are slight variations on the main campaign, suffering from the exact same issues. Within a truncated version of the main campaign, for example, you can invade — or defend — as other unlocked mutations, while King of Kaiju mode offers waves of bosses to fight using the same wonky controls as the rest of the game.
You can also battle friends online, but those controls just aren't nimble enough to support a dedicated fighting game experience. Godzilla enthusiasts can even arrange little monster action figures in dioramas and flip through a digital Kaiju compendium; nice, fan-pleasing additions, but prepare to suffer the slog if you wish to unlock them completely.
You probably won't want to. Following the first fifteen minutes of genuine fun, Godzilla’s repetitive structure, unpolished presentation, under-cooked controls, and unfulfilled potential quickly feel as suffocating as a latex lizard suit. Tokyo’s got nothing to fear here, but gamers sure do.
What's Hot: Leveling cities; impressive roster of iconic monsters
What's Not: Repetitive, grinding gameplay; content unnecessarily locked; lack of tangible progress; sluggish controls; looks older than the original Godzilla movie
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