Pick a 40 story tall monster and kick the shit out of another, equally huge, classic movie monster ripoff. Each one has a completely unique appearance, feel, and moveset. Matches involve 2-4 monsters duking it out in a fairly large assortment of "arenas" full of environmental hazards like tidal waves and earth quakes. Fully destructable environments, complete with tiny screaming people, make you feel like a 140ish foot tall killing machine. Topping off the cake is some of the most fun multiplayer in existence. There's also a few entertaining minigames, and a couple of badass boss battles. A hugely unappreciated classic.

Games I Dislike That Everybody Else Likes

I gotta be honest, the premise of a fighting game composed solely of classic kaiju-esque beasts in destructible environments is a home run - but man, this thing is the definition of clunky. It feels more like you're fighting against the camera than your opponent, and the slow movement of these monsters is way too literalized here because the fights are a total drag. I get that this is an early PS2 game but this was already THREE years into the system's life, and there are countless games that came out before this which play infinitely better - ones that don't need the crucial precision of a fighter, no less (actually, some of those games include fighters). And on that note, I'm sorry but this thing is just kind of ugly.

Essentially the best giant-monster-based fighter of them all. It really captures what you want from a game with that premise. You can play as a nice variety of kaiju/monster archetypes, a godzilla, a mecha, giant ants from outer space type thing, an atomic robot, a big giant-ray harryhausen statue guy.

And gameplay wise it allows for climbing up giant skyscrapers, throwing buildings and vehicles around.

All matched up with a great atmosphere and visuals, it's aged very well.

War of the Monsters is an arena fighter that is a love letter to giant monsters attack style movies from across pretty much every classical era, from Ray Harryhausen to Showa era Godzilla with a dash of giant robot anime. Aside from the incredibly obvious captain ersatz versions of King Kong, Gojira and Mazinger Z, there are less obvious ones such as Preytor to The Deadly Mantis and Agamo pretty much existing as a non-copyright infringing Daimajin. The references don't even stop at the characters themselves either, there's also a bunch of costumes and one of them turns Preytor into the giant ants from THEM! and one of Ultra V's makes them fem and slightly resemble EVA Unit-01.

Aside from all the references and the cool monster movie theme, the gameplay itself is moderately fun but misses the mark in a bunch of areas. The first is that the camera isn't exactly very helpful at times, it really depends on the stage but even when fighting only one monster and locking on to them the camera can be fairly jumpy and disorienting. There's also a ton of combo strings you can just block in the middle of, which makes several monsters feel like trash tier (poor Zorgulon, he was my fav). The balance is completely lopsided in favor of faster characters because of this, which makes playthroughs with Ultra V nice, but with Magmo a complete chore.

By far the most annoying part of this game though is the CPU. They're a complete pansy who runs away at the slightest bit of trouble to grab health power ups, making it even more troubling when they have omniscience to where they are and when they've respawned onto the map. One of the stages in the campaign has you fighting Preytor and Congar, and I remember taking ages to beat it as a kid, because Preytor constantly flies around shooting at you while grabbing every powerup as Congar pesters you in the meantime. Frustrating as all hell, especially when you're playing a low tier. They also have an amazing ability to find every impaling object and exploding gas truck in the vicinity to nail you with, which makes the airfield stage in the campaign a complete mess. I just really fucking hate the impaling weapons tbh, the button mashing means nothing when another monster is just gonna close in and combo me. It sucks that I hate the campaign as much as I do, because the final boss is actually pretty damn cool.

The entire game reeks of being unfinished, there's two unlockable monsters but they completely lack endings and at the very least Raptros was confirmed to have one originally. Someone also managed to hack Goliath Prime and Cerebulon into a playable state, implying there may have been plans for them to be a part of the roster. Sucks, because Goliath Prime would've been a cool OP sub-boss to play as and ragdoll the CPU with.

It stinks, because I still think the game is fun, but if it had at least a few extra months to maybe make the game more fluid and add in those endings and playable boss characters it could've been an all-timer for me. I personally still recommend giving the game a try regardless if you're interested in the theme, but I definitely advocate for downloading a game save or utilizing a gameshark/codebreaker to unlock everything, because this game uses a shop to unlock things and I remember keeping a save at the final boss and beating them god knows how many times to get enough points to unlock shit. Grindy ass garbage, fuckin' hate that shit to this day.

Maybe in five-ten years someone will mod this game into being better and fightcade will get PS2 support, I'll be the greatest Zorgulon player the world has ever known tbh. Yes, this is a preemptive callout.

Another childhood game of mine I wanted to replay. I put it on easy and eventually gave up because there was a map I had to fight matis dude and robot monkey and let me tell you I failed about ten times. The helicopters from the government only attack you, and the two monsters you face never attack each other, but only you. I had a hard time gaining combos because the creatures would never let you get it in because of the bombardment of attacks. Not to mention they will attack as you are on the ground so it makes blocking impossible because by the time you get back up you are put down again. I like the game and it's monster movie references, but man was I frustrated a good amount of this playthrough. Maybe I'll play it with some friends in the future but even on easy I struggled quite a bit playing by myself. I wish I were better at video games.

7.2/10

Rampage is an arcade classic developed by Midway in 1986. Players had control over three monsters named George, Lizzie, and Ralph which represented monsters familiar to the history of monster movies. The objective was to destroy as much as possible until the player was done in by the forces of the military, racking up scores in the hundreds of thousands in the process. It was a popular game that was ported to every home console that was available for the time and one of the first instances of the player getting to play as the bad guy/the monster instead of attempting to defeat them. This review however is not a review of Rampage or any sequel to the original arcade game. This is a review of the 2003 PS2 game War of the Monsters, an arena fighting game that I grew up with that takes a heaping amount of inspiration from Rampage. War of the Monsters is a game that revels in the concept of controlling a crushing behemoth, pitting themselves against others with our beloved cities as their playgrounds. War of the Monsters was not the only game with this premise that was taken from the pages of Rampage. There was a slew of Godzilla arena fighting games during this time where the players could duke it out as giant monsters, destroying an urban setting in the process. However, these were licensed games that were restricted to the properties of the Godzilla film franchise. Like Rampage, War of the Monsters features a smattering of original monsters that share a strong resemblance to the classic ones. Even then, War of the Monsters is completely different from Rampage. Rampage was very light-hearted, silly, and comedic. The monsters can eat a guy sitting on the toilet for Christ's sake. The direction of War of the Monsters is to instead tribute the era of the monster movie and inspire the same thrills it once did.

To achieve this sense of serious tribute, the presentation of War of the Monsters is through the roof and is one of my favorite aspects of the game. The opening cutscene details the premise of the game competently; alien ships invade earth and we humans overcome them with science, but there is another unexpected threat on the horizon. The defeated alien ships crashland on Earth and leek a green ooze that transforms animals, objects, robots, and people to gargantuan size, creating twelve different monsters that fight with each other for either dominance or just for the sake of untethered chaos. The game’s opening screen displays the menu on a drive-in movie theater screen with some retro cars from the 1950s in the foreground. This game isn’t a parody of the cheese-factor of these B-movie monster flicks we’ve come to jab at in retrospect. This is the experience of bringing a date to the drive-in back in 1958 and having your date scream her head off as the popcorn explodes and rains down all over your leather seats. The presentation here is as unapologetically big as the monsters it’s presenting, a needed aspect of any monster movie. I’ve always loved the various sounds of the menu whilst scrolling through them, big bombastic sounds fit for a large theater. The foreground of the menus is misty and ominous like the people viewing this in the foreground are in for a thrilling time. All of this is accompanied by a full orchestral score that perfectly fits the grandiose scale of a monster film. With all of this presentation in mind, War of the Monsters is a passion project for those involved with its production. They want to exude all of the strong merits not only of the monster movie itself but of the monster movie viewing experience.

For being a sincere tribute to the monster movie genre, War of the Monsters is still a fun and accessible game. One would have to fuck up pretty badly to make a game revolving around monsters fighting each other dull and unstimulating. While the presentation is great, it would be nothing without the cast of monsters to uphold it. Each of the twelve monsters is unique from one another and are evident tributes to famous movie monsters (Togera is Godzilla, and Congar couldn’t be anything else but King Kong), based on obscure movie monsters (I had to look up what monster Agamo was based off of. It’s some monster named Daimajin), vaguely based on familiar monsters from the classic films (Preytor is either a Godzilla enemy or based off of the film Them!), or seem like original creations (I don’t know what Magmo could be). While they have their differences, each of them functions similarly in combat. The controls in War of the Monsters are quite simple. Attacking is reserved between the square and triangle buttons, one initiating a light attack and the other initiating a heavier attack. The circle button picks up items and other monsters and throws them with the same button. R2 blocks and the X button jumps, rounding out the simple control scheme of the game. Two special moves can be initiated with two separate button combinations when the player’s energy bar is full. One is a long-range attack, and the other is a blast of energy that clears away nearby enemies. I appreciate the diversity present here with the monster selection, but the game is heavily unbalanced between all of them. Half of the roster is slower than the other half, which gives the quicker monsters a total advantage. I always felt handicapped playing as either Agamo or Togera but felt spry and proficient with Preytor or Kineteclops because of their speed. For some reason, playing as Ultra-V felt way too easy, and slaughtered the other monsters with him. I guess he’s just a testament to superior Japanese engineering or something.

The environments are just as essential and dynamic to the monster movie as the monsters themselves. Like the monsters, they share a striking resemblance to real-world locations. Gambler’s Gulch is Las Vegas, and Baytown with the Coit Tower and Golden Gate Bridge in the background is a no-brainer. Every level comes with unique musical accompaniment, and the screams of the ant-sized humans are appropriate background noise for the setting. Every environment is completely combustible to the point where it might give the player the incentive to destroy the entire city. Vehicles and other environmental objects can also be thrown at the other monsters. Any object that can impale another monster leaves them vulnerable enough to do a large amount of damage to them. Some states have unique elements, like the active volcano in Club Caldera or the ufo-triggered tsunamis in the Tokyo-inspired Tsunopolis. The variety of the levels is as abundant as the roster of monsters.

War of the Monsters is also way more difficult than I remember. After years of not playing this game, I started it again for this review and found it saved on the easy difficulty. I chortled and confidently changed it to medium, thinking I could handle it, but then I remembered why it was set too easy in the first place. Even on medium difficulty, War of the Monsters is merciless. The enemy monsters are ostensibly privy to all of the attack moves that the game keeps secret, like the counter move, the headbutt, and then the dive bomb move, and will use all of these to pound you into the dirt. Even if the player knows how to do these, they will still have difficulty attempting to execute them. The dive-bomb seemingly needs 100% precision to execute, pressing the triangle at the maximum height after a jump. I cannot execute this move to save my life, yet I’ve seen CPU monsters do it with just a brisk hop in the air. The enemies will also routinely run after health and energy items, mostly to screw over the player rather than heal themselves. I shudder to think what hard difficulty is like if this is what medium difficulty is.

Like most fighting games, the optimal way to experience War of the Monsters is with friends. Unfortunately, due to the game being a PS2 exclusive, there is a maximum of two players. I understand that this game was published by Sony, but limiting the number of players to only two is a waste of fun potential. When you can’t find one other person to experience this game with, War of the Monsters offers plenty of single-player experiences. Even the multiplayer modes can be played solo, but it’s a wonder why anyone would. There is a single-player campaign that takes the player’s monster of choice through a stream of levels with a few unique boss battles in between. The only problem is that it’s the same sequence of levels no matter which monster the player chooses, so replaying the campaign with the monsters is incredibly tedious. At the end of each monster’s campaign, there is an origin story cutscene detailing how the monster came to be. Each of these is brief and can only be seen again after the player finishes a specific monster’s campaign. It would’ve been great to have these saved to an extras menu, but the developers begged to differ. There are extra unlockables that can be purchased in the main menu. These include unlockable stages, characters, skins, and extra games. Most unlockable items are a great incentive to continually play through the game for tokens, but the extra games are laughably unfinished. I don’t understand why developers of fighting games implement extra modes to distract from the main course, but at least put some effort into them, unlike the developers here.

War of the Monsters is a treat for anyone fan of classic monster movies. Unlike the Rampage series, War of the Monsters takes its influences and treats them with a sense of dignity and respect. Its stellar presentation showcases the long-lost thrills of the monster movie genre and the culture surrounding it. Unfortunately, the game is beset by many shortcomings in the gameplay department. The unbalanced roster, the arduous movesets, and the punishing level of difficulty make War of the Monsters more trouble than just a simple excursion with giant monsters. Fortunately, the appeal of giant monsters beating the snot out of each other still resonates here regardless. It could be much worse, but it’s a shame that these lackluster aspects do not match the passion put into the presentation here. The legacy of War of the Monsters is a fun multiplayer romp buried in the Sony back catalog of the early 2000s and nothing more.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Fairly rare (PAL version) game I borrowed from my friend back in school.

Fairly decent, but it's relative rarity at the time was more notable than its gameplay.

I believe I got far in this game but am unsure if I beat it.

esse jogo é incrível, joguei demais ele com meus amigos quando pequeno e era sempre divertido demais. fiquei muito feliz quando vi que ele estava no catálogo da plus.

sei que hoje em dia esses controles já estão obsoletos demais e quase que eu dropava só por conta disso, mas dei uma chance e acabei acostumando.

oh saudade de jogar isso com os amigos. marcou demais na infância no ps2.