Godzilla: The Game (2014)

If you want to feel like a monster destroying a city while you fight other giant monsters, I have a hard time thinking of any that come closer than this.

I really wish this game had a sequel to fix some of the issues I had with it such as the lack of level variety, if you plan to 100% this game like I did, you will be destroying the same few locales hundreds of times and it is super egregious when you're doing the singleplayer since places that you've already destroyed will be miraculously repaired a bit later due to them needing to recycle locations, those construction contractors must work super fast! Needed more locations from the films.

Fighting and destroying are the highlights, quickly destroying a large part of a city or totally crushing a rival monster are great feelings but some monsters could do with more attacks to even the playing field or to better destroy the locations.

Objective variety is a bit lacking too, you need to destroy generators to complete a level but if you aren't fast enough a monster or two appears and you need to destroy them before you can finish. Later levels add a time limit that you need to complete the objectives before otherwise you game over. If you play as a good monster like Mothra you instead need to defend the location and defeat a nasty monster. Objectives that play to the monsters unique abilitys would be better, like maybe Kiryu has to manage its power usage otherwise it will go beserk or Spacegodzilla has to convert the locations into crystals which makes him more powerful, there's sadly nothing like that.

The story kinda sucks too, Godzilla is the only monster with a plotline and a secret ending, the rest don't have anything specific (but they do sometimes have encounters that reference their respective films which is pretty neat).

In a nutshell the game needed more variety that could have been ammended in a sequel.

This game was really poorly received when it came out and think thats unfortunate because in a lot of ways this is exactly what I want out of a Godzilla game and some of the stuff thats actively bad is easy to ignore.

The main mode of the game is you as godzilla going into an area destroying some generators, beating up another kaiju and going on to the next level. There are 10 levels in a run of the game although its possible for your game to end early if you don't grow your Godzilla enough.

You have a destruction combo meter on your screen that goes up as you of course destroy things, buildings, crosswalks, tanks, and helicopters all add to your meter which in turn makes you bigger.

After stomping around a bit in a level a rival kaiju will invade, this portion can actually be skipped if you are destroy all of the generators before they appear but for reasons I will go into later, this probably isn't really worth doing.

There are a ton of other monsters from the Godzilla franchises, at the time, 60 year history in this game and the best part is you can play as every one of them.

After beating the main game you unlock the invade and defend options when starting a new run, this will let you choose any of the other monster ls to play through the main mode or a select amount of the normally more friendly to humans monster to play through the defend mode. This mode is the same structure as the invade mode but instead you are trying to avoid damaging buildings while defeating the invading monster.

Now we get to the worst aspects of the game, evolution mode and the vs mode.

Evolution mode isn't really a new mode its just where you go to upgrade your monsters. You can upgrade your monsters attacks and unlock more special attack meter using evllution energy obtained by destroying things and monster material obtained from destorying enemy monsters in invade/defend mode . For godIlla you can upgrade all of his attacks, for the other monsters its just the number of special attack meters and how quickly they fill.

The issue here is just how little evolution energy you actually earn playing the game, to fully upgrade a character you would need to play through the whole game, destroying everything, with a decent combo to earn enough for even a few upgrades. How long it takes to upgrade a kaiju really depends on how fast they can move and attack, as you need to be speedy to keep your combo up. This leads characters like mechagodzilla to be at a distinct disadvantage. This really leads to the whole game feeling like a slog if you try to 100% it.

The other issue is the vs mode, the different monsters just aren't balanced at all, you can really tell that this was made as a single player game and they tacked this on. With some characters like burning godzilla able to completely stun lock the other player. It has online play although it doesn't track win/loss or even the number of games played.

One last feature is the diorama mode, you will unlock different backdrops and different poses for the various kaiju can be bought with evolution energy. Unfortunately this mode is a bit scant, you can only have up to 4 figures per diorama including tanks and planes and there aren't many camera options.

Overall fun and I love it even if I don't know if I can call it a great game on a design level, I'd recommend it if you can somehow find it cheap.