By Keith Milburn
Godzilla's track record hasn't been great when it's come to games. Bouncing between systems and developers, the oversized lizard has never had a game worthy of carrying his iconic name.
Developer Natsume Atari's latest offering (which is actually a re-release of a PS3 title from last year) doesn't do anything to buck that trend – due in part to boring combat, poor visuals and an inflated price point.
The core gameplay is simple: controlling Godzilla, you can pound around small cityscapes, taking down structures. You achieve this through light and heavy combo strings, charging tackles, and a laser-breath attack on a cooldown.
To progress through the singleplayer levels, you have to take down multiple generators using these tools. Stand too close to a generator for too long, and you'll get knocked back by its shield.
And that's basically it.
There's the occasional wrinkle to the gameplay loop, but none change the fact that for the entirety of the campaign, you'll be busting out the same four hit combo on generators. Taking too long in a level will spawn a rival Kaiju (such as Mothra, Battra, or King Ghidorah), or a human-made war machine.
Sometimes multiple threats will spawn, turning a short and boring level into a long and boring one.
Dealing with rival monsters and war machines is where everything comes apart at the seams. There's no nuance to the combat – no blocking, lock on, or dodging. This means that all encounters are a contest of who can stun their opponent first, and chain that into a combo.
It turns the game into a quest for finding invincibility frames, and bullying AI into corners. It's exploitative, and antithetical to the crashing, thrashing insanity of the source material.
Flying enemies are especially egregious. With no jumping attacks, or ability to manually aim your laser-breath, fighting them is an exercise in frustration – whiffing nearly every regular strike, or missing with your beam because they decided to strafe sideways at the last possible moment.
Flying war machines animate especially poorly, clipping through buildings, and making jittery, impossible turns – like an invisible kid is holding a toy, moving it around the level.
Some of the jankiness to the movement could be written off if they leaned into an old movie aesthetic, like if there were wires tethering the models to some unseen puppeteer's hands above. Because they don't, it just ends up looking cheap.
Dealing with rival monsters and war machines is where everything comes apart at the seams.
The destruction modelling leaves a lot to be desired. You don't wade through buildings like they were sand-castles; instead you utilise the same old combo strings on them, which then makes them explode. They don't deform or crumble, they just pop.
A physics-based approach (something along the lines of Red Faction: Guerrilla) would have gone a long way in simulating the size and scope associated with Godzilla. It doesn't help either that there are only a handful of levels in the game, repeated regularly, with the only minor adjustments to them being the time of day.
Progress through the singleplayer campaign follows a branching, diamond-shaped structure, so whichever path you take you'll always get the same final mission. Between missions, you can choose which Prime Minister will lead the country – determining your next stage, and its difficulty.
Your first run through the campaign will take you about an hour. After that, the game's padding becomes readily apparent.
Each stage has four collectibles. These manifest in game as you standing in certain zones for a couple of seconds, while scientists take pictures of you. In order to progress past certain parts of the story, you need a set amount of photos, which means going back and playing older missions.
Making matters worse, you can't pick specific ones – you have to start the story mode from the beginning. Getting 100 percent completion then means replaying levels you already have photos for, just to get to the ones you don't.
By the time I finished the game, I played through the same content half a dozen times – meaning full completion of the story mode clocks in at about six hours.
While I normally don't like talking about a game's worth as a function of its content and length, it's worth mentioning here. It currently costs NZ$109.95 digitally. That seems far too steep for a game composed entirely of generator smashing, and bumbling monster combat.
The game has extra modes, but when they all utilise the same malnourished mechanics, none of them make the price point any easier to swallow. There's a boss-rush mode, online versus and a defensive mode, where you have to fight other Kaiju before they do too much damage to the surrounding city.
There's also a diorama mode, which is like a photo editor, but with a cutesy premise – you position Kaiju toys around a shoebox-sized set. From there, you can alter things like depth of field, or the camera angle.
You can play as other Kaiju in these modes, but none of their move sets are interesting, as the combat is so rote. Each one can be upgraded (enhancing abilities, or adding new ones), but they all have their own XP pools.
To further convolute the process, material components are also needed, and are gained by defeating specific Kaiju. Unfortunately, most of the encounters are completely random, so you may never get to level up your stats until the game's monster-gashapon decides to spew out something you need.
Godzilla is an emaciated experience, with a dangerously ambitious price tag that smacks of men in suits preying on fans hoping for the best. Once again, this oversized, irradiated monster has been let down by videogames.
One star.
NZGamer.com
Godzilla :: Publisher: Namco Bandai:: Developer: Natsume:: Format: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3:: Rating: PG