Godzilla: Unleashed – WII – Review

I know this is a stretch, but I
wanted to review this game because of the other giant monster game on the Wii,
Rampage:Total Destruction. I know, I know, the game did not get very good
reviews but my son really wanted to play it and darn it all, if we didn’t have
a good time playing and beating it. There was lots of laughs and enjoyment
from both of us. Well, I figured I may be able to tap into the same magic and
play a game featuring massive monsters slugging it out. I was wrong, very,
very wrong.

It’s almost as well known a
video-game curse as making a game based on a movie, Godzilla games generally
stink. Oh sure, there will be people out there who say Godzilla: Destroy all
Monsters Melee is a fine game, but it isn’t, not really. Remember, this is the
king of all monsters, an entire generation of children with cable and a VCR
spent countless hours wasting their precious youth watching movies of grown
men dressed in rubber suits duking it out over cardboard cities. Half the time
there was some incoherent plot about little children and their ability to
communicate with these monsters but did it really matter? We watched because
it was goofy, and violent, and goofy, and the voices didn’t match their mouths
and it was goofy and it was one of the few guilty pleasures that I still
partake in to this day. Plus, if you have seen any of the recent Godzilla
movies, you would probably be somewhat impressed; the big G still has it in
the movies. But I am getting off topic, the movies may rock, but this game is
a real stinker and being a professional reviewer, I can back that claim in the
following paragraphs.

"Sonic’s older, grumpier brother."

The first thing that makes you
want to cry is the fact that "Unleashed" is a horribly, horribly designed as
far as the controls go. If someone were to walk into the room when you were
playing they would see you swinging the wiimote around in a desperate attempt
to get the character’s attack to engage. Using the nunchuk attachment, you run
around the screen trying to get dialed in on your opposition as you flail
around the tiny controller in a pathetic disco move. Fighting is just as bad,
switching from melee attacks to ranged attacks might as well have been
aerobics, I swear I was sweating and breathing like I just ran the 100-meter
dash after my first battle. Now that in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but the
game does not want to respond to the movements at all. It’s an exercise in
futility and it stinks. After a somewhat decent intro, to be smacked with the
one-two punch of wiimote and nunchuk incompetence is almost enough to drive a
Godzilla fan crazy.

Now, the visuals of the game
aren’t so much a step up from the GameCube’s own Godzilla title, and – in fact
– borrow heavily from creature design and locations. The thing that made me
keep playing, and this is something only the hardcore Godzilla fan would care
about, is the fact that I wanted to see as many of the famous monsters as
possible. And I can happily report that all of my favorites are here:
MechaGodzilla, Megalon, Biollante and my all time fave, Jet Jaguar (a robot
who would reprogram itself to fight and in turn, grow to giant sizes). It was
a real pleasure to see all the monsters from pretty much all of the movies.
TOHO (the folks that own Godzilla and it’s characters) also managed to throw
in some new monsters as well. And while the game looks alright, I had high
hopes for this title and was thinking it could at least push the Wii’s
possibilities of greatness. It does not, like I said; there are some recycled
visuals and the disappointing battle locations do nothing to move the game in
a positive direction.

"Halitosis … who says it isn’t
offensive?"

Of course, the graphics stumble
can be loosely attributed to the very weak storyline that the game attempts to
follow. Now, at it’s core, this is a brawler style game, but they could have
cleaned this mess up quite a bit. By providing any number of the more popular
storylines that the umpteen movies follow, the game could have had some real
weight to it. For example, why not make it a more linear storyline? There are
good monsters and bad ones, (they could even keep the lame crystal plot) by
selecting one, you could play through the game as a hero and take on all the
different bad monsters in various locations around the world. Likewise, you
could play as a bad monster and take out the good ones at the some points
around the planet. Reaching the end means you either save the world or enslave
it for your alien masters (another common theme in the movies). Instead, there
are several misguided attempts at a plot and then an all-out battle with
several monsters. What’s worse, you can hold back and watch the others duke it
out until a winner is left, weakened. Then you slip in and kill the remaining
monster. Now, it isn’t as easy as this, but it is entirely possible to play
the game this way since the A.I. is really lacking. Oh sure, you will need to
do some fancy footwork, but eventually the monsters will turn on one another,
clearly a misstep by the developers.

In addition, the game also has
this horrible auto-target feature, Let me set the stage for you – you are
playing as Godzilla, you are fighting King Ghidorah (a real baddie) as you
have him on the ropes you wind up your radioactive fire breath. Just as you
are ready to unleash a serious barbequing on him, a tank rolls into range and
your auto target switches to it. You roast the tank instead of Ghidorah and he
comes to and then fries you with his three dragon heads of doom. Now, this is
exactly what is wrong with this game; you cannot decide 100% of the time who
you are going to attack, whether you like it or not. And that, along with the
poor control scheme, makes this game fail miserably.

The sound effects of the game can
be argued that they are pretty accurate to the movies. There are the screams
of monsters and really bad voice acting are actually par for the course in a
Godzilla movie; so, the bad sound effects, horrendous voice acting and other
cheesy noises are normal. However, we are all used to wanting (or needing) the
coolest sound effects. This is not the case. Now I am split when it comes to
this because I can appreciate bad sound effects in my Godzilla action, but
since the game doesn’t possess 1/10th of the fun a movie does, then I fall to
the side of poor sound effects for the sake of them being just poorly made.

Gameplay: 3.0
Hooo boy, this game does not want
to respond to any one of the wacky flailing moves you must do just to get the
action going. Poor response equals poor control which means no fun.

Graphics: 6.5
It is cool to see all the monsters
from the series and I like the rare instances when the camera automatically
pulls back and shows a panoramic view of monsters slugging it out in a soon-
to-be-leveled city. But then things become recycled and I know the Wii can
produce better rendering than what is provided here.

Sound: 3.9
I already said that the game has
bad sound effects and poor voice acting, so sad. There isn’t even the
campiness of the movies.

Difficulty: Medium
With a game that has AI as simple
as this, it won’t take long to figure out its weaknesses. The auto-lock
function is as big an opponent as you will see on the screen, only this one is
tougher.

Concept: 4.5
I wanted to get into this title,
and it simply never occurred. The basic idea was pretty poor in its inception
and the whole idea was a big letdown.

Multiplayer: 3.5
Huh, it was a sad enough game when
you were playing against the A.I.; now, if you call a friend over to play, he
or she will probably give you a welt on your shoulder for inflicting such
harm.

Overall: 4.0
This is a really bad game,
and made even worse by taking such a cool license and dragging it across a
desert of poor controls and ineffective ideas.