Summary
Despite being a lover of the King of the Monsters, I was unfortunately too young to experience Pipeworks Software’s Godzilla trilogy of 3D kaiju-fighters back its PS2/Gamecube-era heyday (there was a PS2 in the house as a young child, but I also had no agency to ask for games or money to buy them). As such, I’m not necessarily the intended audience for Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, a remake of Pipeworks’ first entry back in 2002, but I can gladly tell you thanks to my time with the Steam Next Fest demo that nostalgia is not needed to enjoy this classic made anew. For readers who were introduced to the Godzilla series via more recent entries such as the Hollywood Monsterverse, 2016’s Shin Godzilla or 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, DAMM (yes, that’s the acronym I’m using) might seem more than a little silly at first. The monsters look more like people in rubber suits than titans that once ruled the earth, and they fly around like ragdolls into the stratosphere when hit particularly hard. This is all very intentional, and beautifully recreates the charm of the Showa (1954-1975) era of Godzilla films, in which the series went from utterly harrowing debut Gojira to the game’s namesake, an event movie in which an absolute fuckton of monsters had it out like action figures being slammed together. I really can’t overstate how well this game captures the vibe of the Showa era’s blend of silliness and seriousness. As for the 1v1 monstering experience of the remake itself, it’s largely unchanged from the original game. The demo offers a singleplayer ‘Destruction’ mode which lets you pick a monster of your choosing to absolutely wreck an unsuspecting city — the demo would only let me choose Seattle as a stage, which I found kind of hilarious; that poor Space Needle — and gain a high score for causing as much mayhem as possible. The star of the show, though, is Versus, an arena mode that can be played locally, against CPU opponents, or online. The controls take a moment to get used to, with each monster feeling a bit sluggish (unsure how intentional this is) but handling well after some time understanding that you’re just going to keep pressing block by accident, forever. There’s also pickups across the stage to give you or your opponent little boosts, including one displaying the Atari symbol that summons Mothra for an air strike (sure!). The online function seems to work decently well, playing out just as an offline versus match would with only the occasional added jitter (though, admittedly, no connection indicator that I could see). One thing I do find a tad odd about this demo is its choice of playable roster. Obviously, it’s going to be very limited, so there’s just three monsters to choose from: Godzilla, King Ghidorah and Gigan. The first two are a given, but Gigan confuses me - while definitely a popular monster, one of the remake’s selling points is the addition of the Showa-era Mechagodzilla, which previously didn’t appear in the series until the later Godzilla Unleashed. For a demo with a limited cast, why not let people play as the one monster completely new to the game? All that is to say, I really do recommend this demo whether you played the original or not. And if you like the vibe of kaiju smacking each other around, might I also recommend watching a few of the Showa era films? Start with the original and go in release order, of course. It’s fun to watch in real time how Toho takes itself less and less seriously.