Simply put, Godzilla Unleashed is a horrible game—all 17 painful stages. The ‘story’ is that colored alien crystals have fallen to Earth. Some crystals have had adverse effects on some of the monsters (and even the humans). Blue crystals will replenish health, yellow crystals will replenish energy, while purple and green crystals will increase your “excited state”. Outside of the blue and yellow crystals, the fact that the crystals are on the board really makes no difference.
At the start you can only play as one of the four factions: the Earth Defender. You have three monster choices: Godzilla 2000 (from the movie), Anguirus and Fire Rodan. In order to unlock the other three factions (Aliens, Mutants and Global Defense Force) you have to earn enough credits. Then in order to get the monsters unlocked you have to buy them with the credits you have accumulated. Chances are very good that you will go through this game once and never play it again, so the necessity to play though multiple times in order to unlock everything becomes somewhat pointless.
The Wii version is a bit different from the PS2 and it is obvious that Pipeworks put more effort toward the Wii edition. The framerate dips are not as apparent, although they do show their ugly face from time to time. The graphics are also much better and the game runs more fluidly. From a gameplay perspective they have fixed the broken throwing mechanic from the PS2 version and you can now throw your opponent in order to put distance between you to charge up your projectile or go after a colored crystal to restore some energy.
The Wii controls, well intentioned as they may be, become the major stumbling block from enjoying this game. A simple addition of allowing a player to use the Wii Classic Controller or even a GameCube controller could have remedied the problems outright. The main contention on the control front comes from grabbing and executing a special move. In order to grab your opponent you need to put both the Wii remote and nunchuck vertical and then tilt them forward. The movement itself does bring a bit of reality to the game, but given how fast the gameplay moves and how iffy the execution of the move comes out in your favor Pipeworks should have thought about another key or motion combination for grabbing. Many times you want to grab the enemy, but by the time the action registers on the screen your opponent could be out of your reach.
This game also is very difficult, even on the Easy level. As you go through the stages there are different things you can do to reach a victory condition. Most of the time this involves defeating one or more of the creatures on the screen, but sometimes you can destroy a certain kind of crystal or power grid on the map itself to reach the victory condition. After every victory you are given credits that you can use in the store to unlock the other factions and other monsters as well as other extras.
The cutscenes are very interesting simply because the voice actors are either terrible or purposefully acting like the actors do in the Godzilla movies. Each cutscene is done in a graphic novel-like feel. The scenes are hand drawn and usually the camera will pan in and out to give the feeling of some tension. Pipeworks went this way instead of doing CGI as has been seen in previous games by them and it probably saved them a lot of money in the end by not having to outsource such a thing.
It really is this simple: Godzilla Unleashed is a game best left on the shelves.
