I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for good ol’ Godzilla. While others laughed at the corny dubbing, I would watch intently, and as I grew older and learned how it all worked, I would watch the original Japanese films. Godzilla also forever made me love (to a certain degree) kaiju. I own a few volumes of Kaiju Big Battle, and I loved the scene in Arrested Development. What I don’t love is this game.
It’s just not fun. At all. Even with some of the worst games I’ve ever reviewed or been privy to play, I’ve found at least one redeeming feature. What’s this game’s redeeming feature? It has a poorly drawn Godzilla on the box which may give you a nice chuckle. (And it makes your other games look fantastic.)
Once you open the box, it’s all downhill. Godzilla: Unleashed Double Smash focuses on dualscreen monster sidescrolling action; on the top you’ll have monsters such as Mothra and Rodan who fly, and on the bottom you’ve got good ol’ Godzilla and his irk walking through cities designed in 1992.
In the game itself, your monsters will be on the left of their respective screen, and slowly (I can’t emphasize that enough) progress to the right. You’ll face such frightening enemies as Big Plane, Little Plane, Things That Shoot Missiles, and Floaty Purple Crystal during your travels, in locations supposedly varying but all very familiar to one another.
As you play with your ground or flying monster, a tap of the shoulder button will bring in the reserve; controlling Godzilla and he gets hurt, tap the shoulder button and let him rest while Mothra wreaks mothy havoc on Little Plane.
Wreaking havoc has never been this easy — I don’t think it’s been this boring in quite a while, either. Every monster has the same attacks: low attack, high attack, beam. That’s it. It doesn’t matter who you pick in this game-they all control exactly the same. Actually, that’s not true, because smaller monsters have a much easier time dodging the “that shouldn’t have hit me!” projectiles and bullets. (If you really want to punish your Japanophile friend, make him watch as you use MSPaint Godzilla to leap around and dodge missiles while spinning with your tail.)
Each level finishes with a boss fight. If you really, really try, you can get some semblance of strategy out of them. If you’re smart and want to get the game over with, you can just beam attack nonstop and never lose. (If you’re even smarter, you won’t be playing in the first place.) If you start the game you’ll have to finish in one sitting, too, because this game doesn’t save progress. They don’t tell you that, and it does save something while playing, but when the DS powers off you have to start from the beginning and watch the horrid opening cutscene again and again. (In a confusing move, the instructions list a section on saving, but it’s missing from the actual booklet.) I saw it and the other cutscenes many times, and I still don’t know exactly what’s going on in this game. Something about a Space Godzilla. It’s hard to see through the tears.
Unleashed Double Smash is an affront to not only fans of Godzilla, but fans of fun. The controls are so simple you can use two buttons to beat the entire game, the levels are so short it seems like the developers purposefully made your monsters scroll slower, and the variety is nonexistent in terms of gameplay, setting, characters, and every other feature in the game. I cannot think of a single reason anyone should play this game, unless you’re looking for a reason to stop playing videogames and focus on studying for that upcoming final.
