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| Godzilla Unleashed, Nintendo Wii; A Review | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jan 22 2008, 07:01 AM (277 Views) | |
| <span style=Therren Cragan</span></span> | Jan 22 2008, 07:01 AM Post #1 |
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Your Resident Homicidal Maniac
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So, basically I just bought the game about a week ago and being the Godzilla nut that most of you know I am of course I found the game entertaining. Anyways, I'm gonna go ahead and do a quicky review so that you guys can make a decision for yourselves as to whether or not to buy this game or rent it to check it out for yourselves, and I'm going to do this review based on 5 separate areas and give them ratings from 1 to 5, one being lowest: Game Play: This includes not only the depth of the gameplay itself but the games replay value and the effectiveness of its control setup. Story: Pretty obvious. This involves the single player story mode. Content: This includes unlockables, extra features, etc. Sound: Once more, fairly obvious. The quality of the sound, the effectiveness of the timing and the music. Graphics: Again, pretty obvious. So, without further delay here we go. Gameplay: The game is basically a fighting game that utilizes the motion sensitivity of the Wiimotes and the Wii Nunchuk to pull off various attacks. In general this works pretty well, and the 30 or so monsters in the game all handle pretty differently within the confines of the same control setup. Basically, the setup works like this: By pressing the A button your monster punches. If you just press A they will do a standard light punch, but if you were to swing the Wiimote left, right, up, or down while hitting A one of four various heavy attacks would be utilized, each one different depending on your monster. The same applies to B, except with kicks. The real difference with the hand to hand monster fighting comes from pressing A and B together and swinging the Wiimote, however. When doing this, you utilize the special "Weapon" attacks, attacks completely unique to each monster (in the case of Godzilla, for example, he can begin to pummel the enemy with his tail). There is also a nifty aiming system for the ranged attacks, in which you twist the Wiimote left and right (kind of like a doorknob) to turn your attacks left and right and point up or down to aim the attacks up or down. Now while this setup makes for some intense fighting, the problem comes from the fact that because you end up moving so quickly to do different attacks you will often times end up either repeating the same one over and over or doing something completely different. Grappling runs into a huge problem with this system since it requires you to shake the Wiimote and Nunchuk and the same time, but swinging the Nunchuk alone causes you to jump. I'm sure you can guess what happens alot when it doesn't read right. Another issue is the way the control setup handles. Because it requires you to actually swing in different directions to use your moves while pressing the button at the same time, it's very easy to get lost or confused with the system so it takes some time to get used to. Still, the intensity of the fighting makes it worthwhile in the end, especially when you get to unleash the even more intense aspects of the game such as going Critical Mass, which I will explain in the Story section due to its higher relevance. On top of this, the sheer amount of playable monsters and the very different ways they all handle greatly increase the replay value, not to mention the possibility of up to 4 person multiplayer battles. Final gameplay score? 4/5. The setup is simple enough for anyone to play, and the fighting can get very intense and very fun. However, the issues with the Wiimote reading correctly or not can take away from the fun, and the fact that the setup is difficult to use at first takes away from the experience as a whole. Still, the fun far outweighs the minor issues. Story: In almost anything dealing with Godzilla, not much can be expected from the stories. Cheesy and generic, they are your basic sci-fi monster stories geared more towards kids, but this cheesy genericness is part of what makes it fun. Anyways, the general story goes like this: An alien menace known as the Vortaak (the primary villains from Godzilla: All Monsters Melee {GC} and Godzilla: Save the Earth {PS2}) has returned to attempt yet another takeover of Earth. However, just outside of Earth's orbit the Vortaak fleet is pummeled by a massive meteor storm that crashes into the nearby planet. Soon, enormous crystal formations begin to appear all over the planet, driving the monsters crazy with the powerful radiation they emit. In the story mode, you select one of four factions of monsters, each with different goals. The Earth Defenders, which include Godzilla, seek to destroy the crystals so they don't rip the planet to pieces. The Global Defense Force, on the other hand, is comprised of the various Mecha units utilized by the world's military to battle the monster threats (including Mechagodzilla 2, Kiryu {aka Mechagodzilla 3}, and Jet Jaguar). The Alien forces of the Vortaak have their own goals as well, and seek to preserve these crystals to find a way to use the energy for their own goal of conquering the planet. But the largest threat comes from the Mutants, a faction of monsters bent on gaining ultimate power by absorbing the crystal energies and becoming the new dominant life forms of the planet. Depending on how you play the game, your allegiance with certain factions will rise and fall accordingly. For example, if you play an Earth Defender and destroy the crystals, your ranking with the Earth Defenders will rise and other monsters of the faction will fight alongside you. But, if you attain Critical Mass while destroying them, something the Earth Defenders wish to avoid but the Mutants wish to attain, your ranking with the Earth Defenders will drop and your ranking with Mutants will rise (Critical Mass, which I mentioned earlier, is essentially like an ultimate form the monsters can attain. By destroying the green power crystals, your Critical Mass meter will activate and any attacks you make or damage you take will cause it to grow for a short period of time. When it fills all of your attributes except for your speed increase and you essentially double in power). With this setup, the story becomes largely based on what you do in game and the outcome will change depending on how you play. It's of no surprise that the story isn't really super solid. Things change depending on what monster you play, and the story never stays the same which is nice. However, being a Godzilla game, the dubbing in the story isn't fantastic and the few portions that are voiced over aren't done so in a very good manner. Another issue is the fact that whenever the story is introduced it is done so in a slide-show manner, meaning that instead of CGI movies hand drawn pictures with voice overs are shown. This personally disappointed me since it wouldn't have been hard to make good looking CGI movies for this game. Final score for story? 3/5. Again, you can't expect much. The story is generic and cheesy, but the story mode is fun to play because of the fact that you can select what levels you want to play and the fact that the story will change depending on how you choose to play the game. Still, the lack of any actual CGI movies is a drawback, since the slide-show storytelling pulls away from the gameplay even more than CGI movies would. Content: The content in the game is alright, nothing fantastic. As you play you earn points to buy things in the shops. The primary use for these is to unlock the other factions and their monsters, but there is also a plethora of extras to unlock including previews of recently released Godzilla DVDs, concept art, environment art, and so on and so forth. The best part of the content is actually the inclusion of 2 brand new monsters in the game, monsters never featured in the Godzilla movies: Krystalak and Obsidius, both members of the Mutants faction in the game. Krystalak Photo Krystalak is a semi-sentient creature that appeared soon after the formation of the power crystals that grew after the massive meteor shower. With large crystal formations growing from his back, it is clear that Krystalak is somehow directly related to these crystals. Krystalak usually fights using the incredibly sharp crystal claws on his hands and the crystal spikes on his body, but does also posses the power to launch crystals from his tail and fire a blast of crystals in all directions from his body. Unlike most of the other Mutants, Krystalak isn't especially powerful in one particular area. He has a high Strength and Defense rating, his speed is average, but something that is very odd in comparison to the other mutants is that his Weapon skill is very weak. Krystalak's look is fairly neat, but mostly funny since he kind of looks like a fusion between an ape and a dinosaur, and the fact that he basically has a beard made of crystals is just hilarious. Obsidius Photo Obsidius is an unusual creature that also appeared shortly after the formation of the power crystals. Resembling a cross between a salamander and a human, Obsidius is essentially just what his name implies, a creature made of volcanic stone. Obsidius fights like a fusion between a street brawler and Donkey Kong in SSBM. In a lot of ways he's kind of like the schoolyard bully of the game, represented highly in his grapple in which he grabs the other monster by the throat, roars in their face, shoves them to the ground then slams his fist into their gut. His weapon based fighting is especially high, making the magma blast he fires from his mouth and the headbutts he can make when using his special attack moves highly powerful. However, his defense is only average, his strength is weak, and his speed is low. In general, Destroyah (another Mutant) is just better than him in terms of fighting and has almost exactly the same stats except for higher defense and strength. So what gives Obsidius an edge? Obsidius has more resistances and less weaknesses than any other monster in the game. Obsidius is resistant to nearly every type of attack, meaning that in general he'll take a decent chunk less damage when being hit by special moves than most. In my opinion, while this is nice it's not really enough to make up for his average defense and weak strength, though it is funny to see him roll around and crush things when you try to rush attack enemies with him. Final rating on content? 4/5. Most of the extra content isn't that special, but the unlockable monsters are a very nice thing to have, even if all of them aren't playable in Story Mode. The one major unlockable that sets this game apart from all the rest, however, is the inclusion of the original 1954 Godzilla as an unlockable monster! They went all out with him too, even going so far as to give him the original roar sound bit and making him black and white! Too funny! Sound: The sound in Godzilla Unleashed is quite simply superb. Not a single sound is out of place, and in my experience so far not one of them ever really gets annoying or overdone, except for when the military announces who they're planning to attack, and that's mainly just because of the half second long pause between whatever sentence they're saying and then the monster's name (i.e. The monster has gone Critical Mass! Focus all firepower on.......Krystalak!). The music is good too. Though, being the nut I am I would have preferred music from the movies, the intensity of the menu music gets you pretty pumped to fight and the in game music blends well into the background so it never gets distracting. Final score on sound? 5/5. With the one exception of the stupid pause between what the marines say when they plan to attack a monster, the sound is simply great, with all the sounds fitting the tone of the game perfectly. The bad dubbing in Story Mode is a minor issue as well, but in the end it still works. After all, what's a Godzilla experience without at least some bad English dubbing? Graphics: The game really shines well here. Graphically this is one of the best games to grace the Wii. While everything might not be absolutely fantastic looking all the time, this game broke a ton of new ground with the graphical capabilities of the Wii. This is actually the first game to use uneven environment textures pretty much everywhere, making all the hills, rivers, and oceans look natural (they talk about this in one of the unlockable movies, but unfortunately I cant remember what the designer said this was called). The Sydney level really shines here, with the sea completely frozen and each individual wave sitting completely in place, it has more uneven texturing than any other level in the game and still runs completely smoothly. The other big addition is probably the biggest feat seen on the Wii so far, and thats the collision reaction between monsters and buildings. Basically, it's a lot like Red Faction. Anything was destroyable in that and would react to whatever hit it appropriately and naturally. The buildings are the same way. Punch a building in a certain area and a chunk the size and shape of the monsters fist will be crushed in at that area. Claw a building from one corner diagonally to the other, and it will have a huge gash following your exact swing. It's this kind of realistic reaction that really helps make the environments seem much more real and make the game that much more fun. Almost everything is interactive and almost everything can be destroyed, and look pretty realistic while it happens. One of the biggest boons is the look of the monsters. The textures are incredibly detailed, with basically nothing left out, and still there are never problems with how the game runs. Critical Mass is especially awesome, with the monsters increasing in size about 50% and with massive, red rifts opening in their bodies, they change textures almost completely and the transition is perfectly smooth. Also, the Critical Mass adds in another monster to the list of playables in a way, one that fans of the movies will remember from Godzilla vs. Destroyah. It happens when the 90's version of Godzilla goes critical mass, his texture becomes that of Burning Godzilla, the super-radioactive form of Godzilla that is in Godzilla vs. Destroyah. Just a little something extra they added in for the super nerdy fans like me. Final score on graphics? 5/5. While the overall graphics may not be as good as some of the other games on the Wii, the smoothness of all the animations, texture transitions, and the ground breaking achievements are more than enough to earn the game a 5/5 in this department. Overall score? 4.5/5. A very solid game overall, with a great look, fun gameplay, and an entertainingly cheesy story that is very much like one you'd find in the Godzilla films. And with the plethora of playable monsters and the ability to set up your own custom scenarios for the single and multiplayer battles (Brawl mode, which covers the multiplayer aspect, is single player as well) the game has plenty of replay value. Just don't play too long, you can get pretty tired and sweaty (speaking from experience here). |
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I can not tell, is it just me or do we all look just like Adolph fucking Hitler with this swoopy emo-boy dreamy haircut dangling in our faces, making us all indescribably indistinguishable from each other; or maybe I'm just another megalomaniac? | |
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2:16 PM Jul 11