Godzilla can’t seem to get a break these days. First he’s awakened from his slumber by careless weapons testing. Then he’s beset on all sides by other radioactive lizards and giant, mutated moths. Then he gets placed in horrible Matthew Broderick movies. Finally he’s made to be a part of Godzilla Unleashed: Double Smash, a sad excuse for a monster beat ‘em up. It’s no wonder the big guy is so cranky.
There’s so much that goes wrong in this game, it’s kind of hard to know where to begin. At first glance, the ability to choose two different monsters from the Godzilla universe, one to trample through the bottom screen of the DS and one to take to the skies in the top screen, seems like a good idea, however in practice it doesn’t work. For one, the collision detection in this game is horrible and whichever monster gets the unenviable task of traversing the ground will find themselves constantly smashing into jets, tanks and boats as their massive claws and drill hands are of no use. In fact, the only attack that was even remotely useful for Godzilla was the leaping tailspin which seemed more at home in Godzilla 2: Electric Boogaloo than a Japanese monster movie.
Things are a bit better for whichever beast rides the thermals up top as the developers seemed to have focused the enemy attacks more on the beast on the bottom screen leaving it extremely easy to simply pilot your flying beast out of the way of most attacks. For those that won’t budge, frequent use of your monster’s charged up beam attack does the job nicely.
Thankfully you can switch between beasts with a tap of the shoulder buttons and your unused monster will automatically regenerate health to the halfway point should they start getting beat up too much, however given how easy it is to use the flying creatures, and how abysmal the hit detection is for the bottom creatures, there’s really no reason to play as any of the bipedal monsters, Godzilla included, despite the fact that his name is in the title.
The story mode, which has to do with SpaceGodzilla sending crystals to Earth to do bad things such as make Paris turn into a whacked out flower garden, is told through the viewpoint of some random guy and his son. Why Godzilla and the other monsters are helping out is a mystery, as is why when Godzilla is helping out Earth’s cities, he’s constantly being pummeled by Earth’s military forces. Apparently no one told the UN that Big Green is on our side.
The story mode consists of five randomly chosen levels, with Monster Island being the only constant as the final stage. Playing a story level goes something like this: you travel along beating up small planes, big planes, small tanks and big tanks until you get to an obstacle. Then, using times combinations of the B and Y button, you put together combos to destroy the obstacle. Then you travel some more and fight a boss. Then you travel some more and destroy a crystal. Then you travel some more, destroy another obstacle and finally the last boss of the level. The bosses have different attacks and have all differ visually, however each and every one of them can be defeated in exactly the same way, namely parking your flying beast in the lower left hand corner of the top screen and just continually using the charged up beam attack.
Visually, the game is a mixed bag. As mentioned before, the bosses have a nice flair to them, and the individual playable monsters are all easily distinguished from one another, however the game’s cel-shaded look make it appear as if it were coded in PowerPoint. Background environments and non-boss enemies are repetitive to the point of sleep inducing within the levels—however they do vary from level to level. Cut scenes are done in a 2-d animated style which is no great loss seeing how they don’t give you any clue what’s going on.
Once you make it through the story mode, in one sitting by the way as there’s no way to save your progress either mid-level or between levels, you unlock Endurance and Survival mode which allows you to unlock further monster pictures, concept art and biographies by way of pitting your chosen beasts against various enemy onslaughts. As the character models and line art concept pictures for each monster are almost identical, speaking even more to the simplistic art style of the game, and the biographies are nothing to get excited about, once you’ve finished this game once, there’s no reason to pick it up again. Sure, you now have different monsters to play as for the newly unlocked game mode, however all of the flying beasts play the same way, as do all of the bipedal beasts with the only ineffective combo animations and the color of the powered up beam attack.
