Not Another Game Review!
War of The Monsters
It's Like:
The real cool part of most giant monster movies: seeing a large lizard stomp
through cities, destroying buildings and leaving behind a swath of destruction.
And YOU get to be the monster.
The Bottom Line:
Wonderful graphics, highly interactive stages, loads of property damage,
intuitive controls, lots of un- lockable items, and an intense two-player
experience makes this a MUST own for any fan of B-movie monster flicks and at
least one friend. If you have no friends, the slightly anemic one player modes
are still enjoyable, but nowhere near as fun.
The Review:
When I first got a chance to play the demo of War of the Monsters a few months
ago with a few friends, we were quite surprised; only two characters and
one stage were available, and yet we happily spent two and a half hours whooping
the snot out of one another (and the cityscape). Does the full version live up
to my initial expectations? In a word: RRRRAAAARRR (that's giant lizard for
"yes")!
The game is positively dripping with B-movie atmosphere: the opening movie seems
straight out of a 1950s monster movie trailer, the animated menu has a drive-in
theater motif, and each respective stage has a movie-style poster on its loading
screen. ALL the various giant monster archetypes are here: giant lizards,
30-story tall apes, 3 types of giant robots, and big, hulking bricks, to name a
few.
The graphics are stunningly detailed, from the HUGE 3-D landscapes you will battle across, to the tiniest detail on the monsters. I could find nary a trace of the dread "jaggies" that plague some PS2 titles. Buildings crumble to tiny bits of rubble and send up satisfying dust clouds. Masses of people run for their lives as you slug it out.
The environments are very interactive; nearly anything can be turned into a weapon: cars, tanks, planes, antennae, steel girders, chunks of the buildings you've destroyed... Certain stages even have special stage-wide triggers that set off tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.
Of course, all this would be meaningless if the play control
was clunky or counter-intuitive. Thankfully, this isn't the case. There's
one button for a light (but fast) attack, one button for a stronger (but slower
move) move, one to block, and one for a special move. If you ever need to
re-center the camera in the melee, a quick tap of a shoulder button does the
trick.
And though it's simple enough that a beginner can pick up a controller and play within minutes, there is plenty of strategy for those who scratch the surface: you can chain together combos, pick up your opponent and launch 'em into a building, or use one of two types of special attacks (short range or long range). Two player combat is handled very well, switching to split-screen mode if you're far apart enough, but seamlessly cutting back to a full-screen mode when you're close enough.
For all the detail, the completely destructive fun of the game itself, and the epic-level brawling of a two-player battle, the one-player adventure mode leaves something to be desired. After a dozen battles or so, combat against the computer seems to get repetitive, even with the occasional boss battle to break things up. The only real motivation to play through the game more than once or twice solo is that each victory awards you "battle tokens" that you can spend unlocking everything from hidden boss characters to alternate costumes and more stages for the real meat of the game: two player battle.
There are also three gimmicky two-player mini-games, and a solo "survival" mode, but they do feel rather tacked on and just wasn't as fun as playing a straight-up brawl with a friend. You certainly can't go wrong with that choice in this solid 3-D brawler.