Reviewed: December 30, 2007
Reviewed by: Brian Wylie

Publisher
Atari

Developer
Pipeworks Software

Released: December 5, 2007
Genre: Fighting
Players: 1-4

6
8
6
5
6.1

Supported Features:

• Unrivaled Destruction: Unleash citywide destruction as one of 23 monsters – including two all completely new monsters
• All New Story: Make and break alliances within the all new dynamic storyline and choose to amass an army or go it alone
• Multiplayer Mayhem: Party modes supporting four players for insanely destructive social battles

So all this sounds great right?! Sorry to tell you it isn’t. There are many flaws with this game. The biggest and most crucial is the storyline. You are unleashed to help destroy the space crystals but you don’t have to destroy any of them to pass the level and move on. You have a time limit to do one of two things: Avoid the other monsters on the level and destroy the crystals, or forget about the crystals and destroy the monsters. I hate the fact that you have no idea what needs to be done.

Another flaw that really gets aggravating is the auto-locking feature that you can’t control. There are many instances where you will be locked onto a target like a crystal or a monster and something will come out of nowhere and your attention is now locked onto the new intruder and not the object that you were trying to obliterate.

The final flaw comes with the controls. Now with an action game on the Wii I have come to the conclusion that you are not always going to do what you perform with the remote and nunchuk. I have my sensitivity turned way up and I still had problems with lag and performing a move I didn’t want to perform. The basic controls work very well. These moves are done with pushing a sequence of buttons: A for a punch, B for a kick, C for a distance attack, Z for blocking, and even shaking the Wii remote and nunchuk to grapple works perfectly.

The controls become an issue when you want to vary your attacks. One example of this is when you want to attack high or low. If you want to attack high you swing the remote up and press the appropriate button. Most of the time you will attack correctly but there are far too many times when you attack the opposite. The moves that work the least are when you move the Wii remote from side to side. The movement doesn’t register most of the time and if it does register it isn’t always the move you wanted to perform. On the whole, I would say that the move I wanted to perform was complete about 55 percent of the time. These control problems really only get you into trouble when you play in the multi-player modes.

If I have turned you away this game based on my bashing of the story mode hold on. This game is far better in the multi-player mode. You have five modes to choose from. You can play in versus, classic melee, classic destruction, last man standing, or you can even create your own mode.

Versus mode is exactly what it sounds like. It is a two player combat mode. You pick a city you wish to brawl in, and then you slug it out to see which player is the better fighter in a best out of three rounds fight. In this mode you can chose some locked characters that are not unlocked in the story mode to play with, but to have a chance to pick and fight with any of your choosing you must go through and get points from the story mode to buy them.

The classic melee mode is more for the true fighters. Here you are awarded points for knockdowns, knockouts, and combos that you perform during your fighting. Other than getting rewarded for being the better fighter this mode is in close resemblance to versus mode.

Classic Destruction is by far the most fun mode in the multi-player modes. I am a huge fan of Rampage and this mode reminded me of that game. You earn points for destroying city buildings and anything else. What makes this better than Rampage is that the cities are in 3-D and you have so many more ways of destroying things. Small structures crumble as you walk over them, while bigger structures fall after being ripped apart piece by piece.

With a big party I would recommend Last Man Standing. This is a one round, every man for himself, all out brawl. No points are awarded - it is just straight carnage. This mode will give bragging rights to whom ever is left standing.

The character designs were put together pretty well in my mind. The colors were perfect and actually were detailed very well for the Wii. You can see the color scheme on Godzilla with all of his purples, greens and reds and with all of the other monsters as well. One of my favorite parts was if you got your monster to critical mass you could see it grow and change from its original colors to the black with red veins everywhere. This game really didn’t shorten you on the character graphics from any angle you look at them.

The cities were very well thought out and put together well. Now I have not been to any of the cities outside the US but Atari made sure that the big identifiers, like Big Ben in London and the Golden Gate in San Francisco were there. The buildings are also well proportional to the monsters to show how big they are in.

There were only two problems I had with the graphics. The first one was when you start to destroy a building you didn’t see any debris fly off. When you punch, kick, or tail whip the building all you did was dent it and put holes in it. The second problem was that the buildings just fell straight down just like they do in Rampage. With a 3-D level design it would have been so much cooler and more motivating to destroy skyscrapers if they fell down to the left if you swung from right to left and delivered the final blow. Maybe I am asking for too much detail from the Wii but with the work they have shown me in recent games I really don’t think it is out of reach to go a little bit further into set designs.

The game starts out with some very over the top voice acting that sets up the scenario that is at hand. Your cutscenes between each day/level are cartoon drawings that have closed captioning at the bottom of the screen, which is about a paragraph behind the voices. The good thing about this is that the scenes don’t last very long.

During game play you will simply forget about anything dealing with sound other than the fact that the monsters roars are perfect. The background music hardly ever fits the actions at hand. The contact sounds dealing with the buildings being demolished, crystals being shattered, and the combat sounds dealing with the monsters are hardly noticeable. All is quickly forgettable and don’t really add anything to this game.