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Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters review

Game: Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters
Platform: NES
Genre: Action
Developer: Toho

Reader review by sgreenwell

Date unavailable

Godzilla 2 is probably one of the worst real time strategy games ever released. It manages to make a really boring, tedious game despite featuring some of the greatest pure destruction movie characters ever. Why does Godzilla 2 fail so badly?

First, the story. Save the world from Godzilla! That's pretty much it. He's joined by a few other monsters; a flying UFO, Mothra, and others, most of them from Godzilla movies. The story isn't really a major part of Godzilla 2, which is kinda weird since it's a real time strategy game. You'd think there would be at least a little plot involved.

Godzilla 2 shoots itself in the foot with its plodding pace. You control an army of units against the monsters, often times as many as ten to twenty units. Pretty much every unit you have is demolished in one to three hits from any monster; all the monsters take around fifteen hits to kill, and their life constantly regenerates.

Of course, you can recover your life, but this requires a long trip back to the army base, in which time the monster has regained all of his health. As a result, beating a monster usually requires for you to surround it with units, shooting it until it dies. It also doesn't help that a monster automatically counterattacks to any of your attacks; you have the same ability, but you're usually dead by that time.

Attacking a monster requires you to be right next to him; no range attacks allowed, apparently. All of the movement is on a grid system. Each of your units can move around four to five squares, but monsters can cheat a wee bit; even huge creatures like Godzilla can move six spaces if they want.

Of course, the AI has the intelligence of a moldy rock. Even if Godzilla can kill your unit in one hit, more often then not, he'll just move and demolish a building. What each monster does appears to be almost completely random. This makes it hard to form any reasonable strategy; it's like playing against your five year old sister.

On top of all of this, the stage and game planning is hideous. At the start of the game, you have access to all twelve stages; there's no hidden stages or extra bonuses. There's no real incentive to even play them in order, because it's not like there's an unfolding story or anything. The only thing later missions offer is modified equipment.

Well, that and an impossible difficulty level. As I previously stated, the game's AI is moronic. However, in the later stages, there are SO many monsters they simply bum rush you. The last stage features a whopping eight monsters. You're given SIX units, one of which takes around fifteen turns to build. It's incredibly bad game planning.

The presentation values of the game are even worse. All the graphics are flat and stale, with lots and lots of brown and yellow used. The sounds are even worse; it's an extremely annoying main theme, with bad sound effects sprinkled throughout. Mute your telvision, although a better solution would be to not play this game at all...

Overall, there's no good reason to play Godzilla 2. It manages to take away all the features that make games like Dune 2, Warcraft, and Starcraft fun. The RTS genre on the NES is bad, but it's not even worth hunting for this game. It's really that bad.

Rating: 2/10

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