War of the Monsters
review by Big McLargehuge

When my brother, Chef McLargehuge, gave me a Playstation 2 for Christmas I was thrilled and overjoyed to finally put my extinct Sega Dreamcast to rest and join the vast majority of happy, button mashing console gamers. One title that I’ve wanted to see since 2002 was Iconog’s “War of the Monsters” an adventurous slam fest harkening back to the B-pictures of the 1950’s and their flirtation with creatures of enormous size terrorizing humanity under order of ruthless bug eyed monsters.

War of the Monsters debuted to very little fanfare. At the time the big news in battling console Kaiju was the Nintendo Gamecube release of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee (later brought to X-Box). And it’s sort of a shame that War of the Monsters was essentially swept under the rug (and later stomped by the improbably popular Grand Theft Auto 3).

GTA3 so dominated the PS2 title lineup for so long that War of the Monster’s came and went without much notice. Finding a new copy was virtually impossible. But I never gave up, and finally, after searching high and low through the used racks at no fewer than three game heavy stores I stumbled upon a lone copy.

War of the Monsters has a little backstory that’s kind of fun: In order to free themselves from alien domination, the nations of the Earth deploy a terrifying new technology to cripple alien saucers hovering over all the major cities. The green ooze that escapes these destroyed saucers causes nearby animals to grow to enormous sizes, takes of the guidance and control systems of military giant robots, and brings Polynesian vengeance gods to life.

These new monsters converge on the major metropolises of the world and begin whipping on one another.

That’s pretty much all you need to know to get into War of the Monsters.

The title offers several modes of game play including:

Adventure mode, where you move from city to city and face increasingly difficult opponents until you finally free the Earth from the last of the alien scourge and learn the origin of your chosen creature.

Endurance mode, where you pick a monster and city and fight five monsters in succession until the city is completely destroyed and/or you die.

Free for all, where you pick your monster, the number of monsters to fight and the city to fight in. Free for all offers three options for game play, sudden death, first to win, and no limits. Each one changes the game play only a little. No limits play offers the best way to learn the game controls because you keep respawning and can play indefinitely.

Multiplayer offers Endurance and Free for All modes with up to two computer controlled monsters battling you and a pal in the cityscape of your choice. Multiplay also offers three mini-games; dodge ball, a targeting game, and a race.

Single player options include easy, medium, and hard difficulty settings.

The cities in War of the Monsters take their inspiration from real cities, Baytown looks like San Francisco, Gambler’s Gulch resembles the Las Vegas Strip, etc… Each environment is fully destructable, which adds some cool strategy to the game. In cities like Tsunopolis players can topple entire buildings onto their opponents.

Toppling twenty storey buildings is really cool!

Lots of stuff in the city can be picked up and wielded like clubs including train cars, busses, fuel trucks, helicopters, chunks of concrete, and sharp objects like antennas and iron rods, can be thrown like spears to impale your opponent.

The graphics are very good, but that’s the hallmark of the PS2 console, and each monster has a unique look, feel, movement type, a total of four skins each, and two special attacks (one ranged and one close contact). Each monster has its own unique (and repetitive) cry. The characters borrow liberally from many sources.

Preytor is a mantis.
Congar is a ape.
Agamo is a stone god with a flaming head.
Magmo is a four-armed lava monster
Ultra-V is a Japanese fighting robot
Robo-H7 is an American fighting robot
Kineticlops is an eyeball surrounded by lightning
Togera is a lixard monster that resembles Godzilla (sort of )

Two other monsters await unlocking, Raptros (a dragon) and Zorgulon (the Bug Eyed Monsters). The adventure mode offers a couple of badass boss monsters that don’t appear anywhere else in the game.

Each monster has unique strengths and weaknesses but these are often so subtle it’s hard to notice them. For example, Preytor is the weakest of the line up, but he’s the fastest, Agamo is strongest of the line up but he’s the slowest. The rest have a pretty good balance between strength and speed, and some, like Preytor, had limited flying ability.

War of the Monsters actually resembles a much older game named “King of the Monsters” from the old 16 bit Neo Geo console, the Sega Genesis version of which I played relentlessly as a young adult. The gameplay here is very similar too, each monster has three attack types, weak, strong, and ranged. It’s also possible to pick up your opponent and throw him into, over, or through the city buildings.

The simplified attack structure makes the game relatively easy to play right out of the box, but definitely limits the replay value (more about that later).

War of the Monsters contains some negative characteristics, worst of which is the targeting engine and control structure. The left joystick makes the monster move around the environment while the right stick. The targeting reticule automatically locks onto the nearest enemy, BUT the game moves so quickly (especially when facing multiple opponents) that the targeting function is nearly useless. Not being able to hit the guy directly in front of you because the targeting function wants to shoot at the guy across the map and behind several buildings is extremely frustrating.

It’s possible to not lock onto a specific enemy, but it means most of your shots/punches won’t connect and the computer opponent will wail mercilessly upon you, especially if, like Preytor, they have a speed advantage. The computer controlled opponents are also single minded of purpose with respect to grabbing health power-ups (each level contains several 5% increases, one or two 25% increases, and one 100% increase) so it’s often a race to get them and the computer doesn’t make mistakes when it jumps or flies.

The limited attack structure also limits replayabaility because it’s kind of easy to relentlessly beat the hell out of your opponent in a few seconds if you back them into a corner or alley between buildings. Beating the computer opponents quickly generally prevents you from exploring the cities, and there are some good things to see and do if you aren’t engaged in constant battling. Setting the difficulty to medium or hard makes the opponents harder to beat and offers a little more time to see the sights.

I would have liked a level or two where the only opponent was the military, which makes a few cameo appearances in the adventure mode, but nowhere else in the game. One of the things we giant monster fans love is the eternal struggle between man and monster, sadly this is kept to a minimum in War of the Monsters. You do get to see crowds of people scrambling around in the city, but interaction with them is non-existent.

Sound is boring, with limited effects and unremarkable music ( I turned the music off after the first five minutes). In the split-screen two person game I noticed that it only follows the sound of the second player, so you could be wailing on two opponents, smashing down buildings, and throwing explosive gas trucks at one another, and you’ll hear nary a peep unless the other player is nearby. It’s kind of disconcerting as sound is a somewhat important aspect of the game play for determining where a monster is, or if the building upon which you stand is about to collapse.

Still, drawbacks aside, War of the Monsters is a pleasant (if short) diversion for we Playstation 2 owners waiting for a port of Godzilla: Destroy All Monster’s Melee. Good rental. Used copies are going for nearly new price. I paid 35 bucks for a used copy and haven’t found them cheaper anywhere but Ebay.