Godzilla Unleashed review (Wii)

It seems like perfect fodder for a videogame – big monsters, destructible cities and ridiculously over the top ‘powers’ that each monster possesses. Throw them together into a big fight and it can’t fail, can it? Well, it seems it can, as Godzilla Unleashed dutifully shows us.

This is one of those games where the negatives far, far outweigh the positives, and it’s genuinely difficult to find good points to talk about. Entertainment, or at least unintentional comedic value, will come in the form of the ‘cut scenes’ that crop up during the game’s main story mode. Consisting of comic-book style images and a laughable voice acting and script combination, you can at least be guaranteed of a few chuckles at the plot’s expense. The plot, if you can call it that, is flimsy at best, with no real justification or reason for you going on a rampage and destroying everything in your path.

What's that coming over the hill...

Secondly, there are some hints at originality and decent ideas when wreaking your havoc, courtesy of the game’s controls. Being able to control the direction of, for example, an atomic beam coming from a monster’s mouth (you know, the usual thing) by tilting the Wii remote is a nice touch in principle, but in practice doesn’t work all that well.

Having to swing the remote and/or nunchuk to execute moves also seems like a good idea initially, but after giving the game a try and realising that it’s hard to re-create the same move despite doing the same combination of button presses or remote waves, fights descend into mindless remote-waving and button-bashing bouts.

Despite those two minor positives; some humour and decent ideas poorly implemented; the rest of the game is a horrible quagmire of horrible production values and stodgy, uninspiring gameplay. The main story mode is divided between completing certain objectives with your monster of choice and then fighting other monsters. Neither of these are especially enjoyable, and they make the transition into tedious after only a short time of play.

The objectives almost always consist of destroying something by mashing buttons, and the fights require a similar amount of skill and intellect to complete. Admittedly it’s always going to be enjoyable to destroy things with a giant monster, but with unresponsive controls and vomit-coloured environments that wouldn’t look out of place in an N64 game, the enjoyment factor soon wears off. Bearing in mind that fighting and crushing things is the backbone of the gameplay here, it’s disappointing and surprising that it’s so dull and repetitive.

is it a monster?

The camera doesn’t help matters either, switching from a third-person perspective when exploring the level and then shifting to a side-on view for a fight with a rival beast. The problem isn’t this transition, but that fact that the camera then develops a mind of its own and hovers anywhere in between these two points of view at seemingly random times, regardless of what you’re actually doing at the present moment.

There’s quite a lot to do in Godzilla, with plenty of creatures to take through the story mode and a few different multiplayer modes, but you’ll struggle to care when the core gameplay instils you with no desire to do anymore than the bare minimum to make you feel like you’ve given the game a good go before giving up. If you’re craving some monster-filled destruction with the likes of Godzilla and co, check out War of the Monsters on the PS2. That, unlike Godzilla Unleashed, ticks all the right boxes. Avoid Unleashed like you’d avoid Godzilla himself.