I recently had the chance to try out the latest game starring the king of all monsters himself. The game has both single and multiplayer modes, but I only tried multiplayer battles with 2 and 3 players. I’d heard some mixed reactions to the game at E3 so I was pleasantly surprised after taking the game for a spin.

At the very least, Godzilla is a good, slightly frantic multiplayer slugfest. It’s remarkably fun to lift up buildings and hurl them at your monstrous opponents. Body slamming, punching, and kicking your opponents is alright, but for me, it’s all about the building toss. I’ve had fun destroying towns in classic games like Rampage and Blast Corps, and Godzilla delivered the same giddy feeling. I suppose it’s the little kid in me that liked to kick a stack of blocks down or smash Legos into pieces.

So trampling buildings while bashing Ghidorah and Rodan is a lot of fun, it’d all be pretty moot if the game controlled like you were moving in a giant, heavy, latex suit. Fortunately, the controls were pretty responsive and fairly easy to learn. I was able to get up to speed in a matter of minutes. The monsters felt a bit sluggish to me, but it seemed pretty appropriate for a game starring 50 foot tall monsters and really didn’t detract from the fun at all.

Also, a warning to anyone expecting a super-deep fighting experience. Godzilla has its share of punches, kicks, throws, jumps, blocks and projectile weapons, but it seems more geared to multiplayer mayhem rather than strategic one-on-one battles. And as I’ve already mentioned, the game does a nice job of creating that mayhem. This is not Tekken or Virtua Fighter, people, it’s Godzilla.

Graphically, the game looks pretty good. The backgrounds and environments are pretty simple and are just “kind of there”. It’s not really a big deal, though, as they’re meant to be destroyed. The real stars of the games are the monsters, and PipeWorks has done a good job in faithfully recreating them. The models are highly detailed and quite realistic, though their movement is somewhat suggestive of a man in a rubber suit. The result is a good recreation of what you would see in a typical Godzilla film (no, not that atrocious American one, the real Studio Toho ones that I frequently caught on Saturday afternoons while growing up).

As I said in the beginning, I was pleasantly surprised with Godzilla and it was certainly a fun multiplayer game. I’m a bit concerned about the single player modes, though, as the gameplay really does seem geared towards several friends slugging things out amongst each other. It certainly wouldn’t be the first multiplayer brawler to suffer from a lackluster solo mode (ahem, N64 Smash Brothers). PipeWorks has included an impressive art gallery and several monsters to unlock to help address that potential weakness and add some value to single player mode. In the end, though, it’s probably going to be the multiplayer mayhem that sells Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, and if the game plays as well or better than what I experienced, it should do that nicely.