War Of The Monsters

PS2 review by Jim Smith - Thursday 13th March 2003

So help me, living in the fifties must have sucked. Not only was being a teenager a generally unknown quantity, but rock and roll hadn't really kicked off yet, pre-marital sex was frowned upon, there was no drug culture, no cable TV, no skateboards and definitely no video games. They did, however, have monster movies. The Creature of the Black Lagoon, The Beast From 20,000 fathoms, them!, 20,000 leagues under the sea and, of course, Godzilla, to name but a few. Indeed, while the Americans loved to film lizards walking over model cities in slow motion, our industrious Japanese cousins at Toho studios liked to dress up in big lizard suits and mash fake cities in a similar manor. I wonder whether that says something about the difference in cultures, especially since at the time it had been less than a decade since WWII. Well, maybe I'm going off subject, but the Japanese public really suffered at the end of that war, loosing two whole cities to the atom bomb. If you think about it, a tale about a monster born from the ashes of nuclear testing in the South Pacific comes as no surprise. Godzilla, who literally breathes atomic fire from his mouth and enjoys the gentle stimulation of high-voltage electricity, could eventually only be killed by a resourceful Japanese scientist who has created the ultimate atomic weapon and uses it on the monster, bravely giving up his life in the process.



Propaganda through mass market entertainment? I think so. Something missed on the US, though, where Godzilla was a smash, and provided those with enough cash to churn out sequel after sequel, usually of the 'vs' category, i.e. Godzilla vs Megalon, Godzilla vs Mothra, Godzilla vs MechaGodzilla and even the ill fated Godzilla vs King Kong. Yes, the grand daddy of city leveling monster mayhem even got in on the act. What the hell was he thinking? That crazy ape, tch.

Despite shoddy production quality and long dull bits with Japanese actors trying not to be out acted by their latex counter parts, these movies were fun, in a rubbish way, especially if you were a kid in the 50s and early 60s. And it's exactly this tag-team monster bashing style that is the main influence behind War of the Monsters.

So, let's get down to business. The whole multi-player monster-bashing concept for a game is a great one, but it was always going to be incredibly hard to implement in order for it to be fun. Nintendo couldn't pull it off with 'Destroy All Monsters' on GC so how was Incognito supposed to cope on the technically inferior PS2?



Sadly, the package released predictably stinks of a great project gone sour due either to bad project management, time constraints or lack of effort; I can't decide which.

The opening movie is very cool, the best thing about the game to be exact, and the menus all look very nice, using a drive in movie theme really well. It's when you start playing that things go a bit pear shaped.

The first issue of contention, and it's quite a big issue, is that while the CPU can't handle four monsters on the screen without slow down dead easily, so there is no four player mode. I'll repeat that for those of you not paying attention, no four player mode. Yes, no four player, only two, not four. After I got over that depressing revelation, my opinions sank. Not that I was going to be biased from then onwards mind, since on any level this game is not all that good.



Each level consists of you taking control of a monster running around a scaled down landscape knocking the crap out of the other monsters with punch and kick combos, aerial attacks, long range attacks and long and close range specials. While the combos and specials do look the part they are just too random, and certain monsters seem to pound other monsters with ease. Targeting is sloppy, the blocking system is pointless and the game quickly descends into a button mashing frenzy, especially if you are playing the two-player game, which is even more cluttered than the one player. Maybe one of the problems is that War of the Monsters has inherited a game engine from Twisted Metal. The former game was quite playable, but only if you were playing a car or truck, not a creature, and the movement feels somewhat contrived as a result, more like a FPS than I'd have liked.

The streets you play on are often loaded with buildings to climb up and trash and vehicles to pick up and throw at your opponents, but more often than not I found myself accidentally picking up pointless family cars rather than the useful looking oil tanker next to it. The buildings tend to collapse very easily in a storm of bad animation and I've also seen monsters get trapped under them collapsing and get wasted even though they were quite clearly winning, which is criminal especially considering that there is no crushed monster animation; they just disappear.

Actually, I'll have to sneak in here that apart from those animation glitches the graphics are decent. The frame rate is high throughout and slowdown is rare, I'll give them that. I suppose that's one bonus from inheriting a game engine from an established franchise.



On the field of play, there are a liberal helping of health and special bar pickups all over the shop, but the problem with those is that they become far too integral to the game mechanics than they should be. You often spend a lot of time running around trying to find these items to recharge, although the CPU controlled monsters generally get to them first, or if they don't they simply pound you with missile attacks negating any health you might have picked up.

It's also quite obvious that some monsters are better than others, namely the two flying monsters, Raptros and Preytor (a big dragon thing and a preying mantis). With the ability to fly these monsters avoid all ground troops, get to the pickups first and generally always win. I don't know why the coders didn't think to weaken their projectile attack or something to compensate, but hey - what do I know? Imbalance like this is a real problem, something that too many developers don't have the time or money to sort out any more.

Ah, another problem. I can only assume poor play testing is to blame; the AI of the CPU monsters is simply too good. They are always on you, relentlessly comboing away, especially when you have to fight more than one monster simultaneously; they seem to take it in turns to keep you busy while the other runs around scavenging pickups. This really wound me up. You'd think since the game is called War Of The Monsters that the monsters would go at each other as much as you, but they don't.



Rather than a free-for-all, the CPU monsters always gang up on the player and never go for each other. In fact the only way to distract them is to bring in another player, i.e. play the woefully inadequate two-player game (did I mention that there's no four-player option?) In free-for-all you can play a sudden death match, a match played till one player has two kills or a match that just goes on forever. In elimination, you run on lives instead. Err, that's it, the same game, different name. Rubbish.

Now let's discuss unlockable features. The three mini-games sound fun in principle, but they aren't or are only fun for the first twenty minutes or so. This is especially true of the jumping off platforms game, which just felt pointless and tacked on to the finished package. The hot-potato game is slightly better but hardly fun. Completing the single-player adventure mode (which is the same for every monster) yields you 'points', which you spend on unlocking more monsters, the mini-games and new levels. These aren't bad, but they're not worth playing through the game for. Also, you'll have to beat the single-player game several times in order to have enough points to buy anything, which is a pain in the ass.

In fact, is anyone still reading? Have you already worked out that this game is nowhere near as good as it could and should have been? I imagine so, so that's it; I'm not going to say anymore. It's a shame, I so wanted to play at Godzilla; doesn't everyone?

P.S. After writing this review I dug out my Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Godzilla vs Megalon and had more fun with that than with this, and by a long shot. God bless those crazy Japanese.

Thunderbolt score: five out of ten

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