izigame.me

Before getting into it I will say here: If all you want is to support a potentially great future game, or to play through a flawed but occasionally 'functional' game reminiscent of older kaiju games, then go ahead and pick this up. But if you are wanting a solid, completely functioning experience, you might want to wait. I've long waited for the return of games like this but this game is just not worth the full price (or even 25% discount) and it certainly hasn't filled that craving at the state it is in now.
I want to try and keep this review shorter than a giant wall of text, but for a bit of background the first video game I ever played was Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee. Not only did that start my love of that franchise, it got me into video games as a whole. I have a lot of respect and admiration for what the team making this project is trying to do and what has already been accomplished, and one day I think it might be an amazing game, but it has an enormous slew of issues that marr it.
To go over the positives, the game has a unique and eye catching art style and is chock full of personality. So many of the monsters here are incredibly inspired and great ideas. A giant building that wants revenge on kaiju, a snail that uses it's shell as a living weapon that doubles as another kaiju's skull, these are fascinating ideas that never would have occured to me but once you see them in action you fall in love. On the pure aesthetic check, this game nails it. All the details in animations, taunts, and lore snippets are great.
Unfortunately, every other part of the game just doesn't work. The Online is by far the worst offender. I have over 100 games on steam and across multiple platforms have easily played at least 200 titles, and this game has the worst multiplayer connections of non 'early access' project I have ever seen. You are given options to attempt to fix this with ping limiters and disabling crossplay, but both are literally non-functional. I disabled crossplay and still matched with play station users, and put in a ping threshold of 100 and was getting matched with players 200+. If you host a lobby, you might wait for 10 minutes and not get any other player joining you. Even if you can join a match and get past constant rubber banding and long lag spikes, if any player disconnects the match will end, even if it is not the hosting player. Worse still, in rounds with good connection once a player starts losing they will quit the game to force the match to end. With all these problems, I would say that unless you are doing private matches with a friend, this game should be treated as purely single player until these issues are resolved.
The single player is definitely better, but still flawed. The story mode only has campaigns for a few of the characters, and is extremely buggy. I think I have encountered every possible bug; enemies stuck looping animations, enemies getting stuck at a certain health threshold and not being able to be killed, enemies being unable to deal damage to the player, falling through the world, getting knocked out of level bounds, and multiple straight up crashes, being unable to complete sub-missions, etc. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was not a single story mission where I did not experience at least one of these bugs. On one mission, two allied monsters are supposed to attack you in a story mission, but in my case they spent their time trying to attack each other, but were unable to actually damage each other. DLC monsters do not seem to appear in any of the single player modes unless you play as them, which means given the relatively limited roster size it gets stale pretty fast.
Outside of the actual game 'problems', being terrible online capacity and myriads of bugs, I also find that they game's camera is very frustrating. Outside of bugs where the camera 'disconnects' and zooms to an out of bounds corner of the map, it doesn't actually focus on you , but rather on a sort of 'middle' point between you and your foes. This can make it very confusing and hard to 'find yourself' if you get launched, and from a purely aesthetic choice it makes you feel very small instead of a giant monster because the camera is zoomed so incredibly far away. An option to make the camera focused on the player's monster and more zoomed in would be greatly appreciated.
I don't want to be too negative because at the end of the day I want this game to succeed and I think if the glaring 'functional issues' were resolved it would flip over to being positive. Just the ability to play a match online would be great. But as it stands now, it is literally unplayable online and the constant bugs offline make it incredibly frustrating to play in that way as well. I've still had enjoyment reminiscing on nostalgia and there are definitely good things here, but overall this needs a lot more TLC and I desperately hope it gets it.