Strange alien crystals are wreaking havoc around the world and causing a global monster mash. Teens and button-mashers — as well as ardent fans of the old black-and-white Japanese Godzilla movies with the bad lip-synching — are going to love Godzilla Unleashed.
This game is neither of the "deep storyline" category nor of the "frustrating die-a-bunch-of-times-and-respawn-infinitely" variety. I would classify it firmly in the mindless, fun fighting-game category.
In story mode, the Earth is bombarded by alien meteorites (or asteroids or something — the whole thing is a little unclear) that turn into these crystal things that both cause lots of damage in some of the world's great cities and attract monsters. And there are a whole host of monsters to fight with and against in this game!
There is everyone's favorite overgrown, fire-breathing, earth-defending lizard Godzilla — who's basically a good overgrown lizard, except he's a bit clumsy, and humans tend to dislike him because he can be tough on the architecture. In addition, the game features classic monsters, such as Mothra, Rodan, Kiryu and Megalon — to name a few — and also adds a few new monsters to the mix.
Don't expect a learning curve for this title; just pick it up and play. I did fight better the more I played, but I also had no trouble just jumping into the fray. As with most fighting games involving humans, no matter which monster you play as, the idea is to punch, kick, throw and use your character's special abilities to pulverize your opponent into submission — before they pulverize you, of course.
The game also features a multiplayer mode for one to four players. You can play versus or co-op with multiple game types, such as time-limit or last, err … monster standing, etc.
I found the gameplay to be a fun and interesting mix of fighting. The monsters sometimes fought as I would expect humans to fight and sometimes fought as I would expect monsters to fight. It could be that the developers created them to move this way to capture the how creatures of this proportion would move. Or the game controls could just be somewhat mushy.
The fighting is done in third-person view, which works for the most part, and allows you see all the destruction the monsters are inflicting on the unfortunate architecture. It is great that the world you inhabit with these gargantuan monsters is so destructible. The only drawback is the total lack of camera control using the right thumbstick, so it can be frustrating sometimes just trying to look, move and attack in the right direction.
You can wreak havoc in North America from New York to San Francisco and across the seas in cities such as London; Sydney, Australia; and, of course, Osaka in Japan.
Godzilla Unleashed is a great bit of escapist fun. No matter what monster you choose to be, your only need is to fight well to rack up points so you can unlock more monsters and other goodies so you can fight well and rack up points … If you're a fan of the classic Japanese movies (sorry, the game IS in color) or just like to sit back and fight it out with some pretty cool monsters, give this one a try.
