The store page for this game on GoG is just the rights holders/original devs of the other games in the series openly shitting on this one because it was made by another team. But ... it's not really meaningfully different or worse than the other ones ... ? I mean, It doesn't have the cool damage modeling from CARMAGEDDON II and it's more focused on actual racing (which was essentially a joke in the previous games, on purpose, I guess), but I dunno. I guess if you're a real Carma-head you hate this one or something. I don't see what the problem is. None of them are very good, lol.

Actually a little surprised that this isn't better, based on its reputation. Lotta jank, not much of interest to do in the (admittedly huge and impressive, for 2004) open world, and a short, awkward story. The web swinging, however, is as good as advertised. In the modern games, it's basically an auto-pilot that, if you want to invest some minor effort into, can be a little more engaging and efficient. Here, though, you do kind of have to genuinely learn it to get anywhere at all, and mastering it can feel VERY satisfying. Higher ceiling and lower floor - I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that contrast to the modern AAA experience.

Impressive and worthwhile only for the groundbreaking traversal and for seeing just how much this laid the groundwork for future games. Like, there's both big structure stuff and tiny little gameplay/mission design details that they are still doing EXACTLY in 2023, wild.

A simple but rather satisfying 1v1 fighting game featuring a ton of Godzilla charm. Every character and stage is recreated perfectly from one of the movies, down to Goji being the correct version (nine unique skins total!!) based on who he's fighting and where. Sixteen fighters for versus that you unlock through the story mode which has a fun thing where you get a menu of final bosses at the end based on how high your score was, encouraging better play and trying higher difficulties. The fighting is simple-ish due to TG16 having only two buttons, but there are move variants based on tapping or holding, and they actually manage to cram quite a bit of move variety into the simple inputs - to say nothing of how differently many of the weirder playable kaiju work.

Quite easily the best Godzilla game made by its day, benefitting signifcantly from embracing a simpler, crowd-pleaser type of game, and executing it well.

I do, nevertheless, have to dock it at least half a star for not featuring a playable Jet Jaguar. No excuse.

A very limited and very, very, very slow beat 'em up. Notable only for its absurdly comprehensive cast (we're talking Gabara, we're talking Titanosaurus, we're talking Gezora), but even wringing that little morsel of enjoyment out of this is virtually impossible because there's no way in hell you will be able to slog through it long enough to see even half of those dudes. Seems super difficult until you realize you can just stand around in a quiet spot and fully regenerate your health at any time. And then after that it becomes alternatingly boring in the walking parts and frustrating in the fighting parts when you have to figure out how each boss' hitboxes work, and then repeat a dumb little pattern until you win by attrition. Not a great time!

Kind of synthesizes the ideas of the two NES Godzilla games into something more interesting, more cohesive, and definitely more true to the source material.

... buuuuuuuuut it has a couple major problems that absolutely cripple it, and keep it from any kind of hidden gem status. And it's a REAL shame, because it's alllllllmost extremely cool.

On the positive side, the presentation is darn good. There's real work put into the story ideas, the art, and the VERY faithful music (when you get near the boss and the theme kicks in, omggggg), but especially impressive is the way the overworld gameplay is presented. The story conceit is that the humans have found a way to sort-of control Godzilla and are using him to fight off attacking aliens. So although you ARE controlling him, with your D-pad, you're also kind of not. You point him via a top-down map and he moves sluggishly forward automatically, square by square, and does not instantly respond to new directions, while also going into a little cutscene if he runs into a building he has to destroy or some tanks shooting at him. And yeah, all that SOUNDS horrible and non-gamey, but it's extremely successful at giving you the feeling that Godzilla is his own creature, a wild animal you're desperately trying to direct, and you're more or less just suggesting to him where to go and hoping he listens. (If you understand how it works, he'll always do what you want, he doesn't ignore inputs or anything, but it still feels very indirect. And I think in this case, that's actually pretty cool.) So, couple that with the other half of the screen opposite the map, in which we actually see Godzilla 'live', walking around and doing his thing, but shot from an oblique low angle as though we're watching a feed of someone on the ground relaying his actions back to the humans' home base ... this all confers a very unique vibe that replicates the movies' constant tension between man and Godzilla, even when he's being a 'good guy'. They really put some thought into it.

Unfortunately, despite its merits, this portion of the gameplay - the walking through levels to gather items and find the boss - is really, really slow, and filled with a billion unskippable mini-cutscenes. It succeeds at building up tension for the final battle of each stage against another kaiju, but you need to have some real patience if you're gonna get there. Again, it ties into Godzilla's character and is very true to the movies, but when you're playing this sort of thing as a video game, there's no way you don't just want him to hurry the eff up a bit.

Worse is the OTHER half of the game, the kaiju combat. I'm not going to try to explain it in any sort of real way here, but just suffice it to say that it is weird and dumb. An impenetrable, semi-randomized, tug-of-war, roulette wheel, ATB, rhythm-based ... I don't know what. But it sucks, and the ENTIRE time you're doing the fights you're gonna be wishing to the good lord that it was just some kind of standard fighting game thing instead. Oh and there's a cutscene every time someone does an attack. It's just boneheaded, I don't get it. Either they weren't confident that they could make good actual fighting (and judging by the first NES game, they were correct) or they were just too focused on making the battles cinematic rather than playable, and felt like if they didn't pile a bunch of non-standard weirdness on top of it, it would be too simple. Either way, sucks.

So yeah, this is really close to being the first awesome depiction of the big G in games and shows that they were still really thinking through how best to translate his unique qualities and style to games, and not afraid to take some creative risks to get there. But in a couple places they definitely overthought it a bit.

You fire this up and you're immediately greeted with a nice big splash screen of Goji accompanied by really dark, foreboding music, and it's like, okay, here we go. And then the actual game starts and it's a single-screen-per-stage puzzle platfomer Diet BOMBERMAN with (unrecognizable) chibi versions of the monsters running around and chipper music out of BALLOON FIGHT. This would be acceptable, I guess, but the puzzle gameplay is incredibly simple while also being massively tedious and frustrating as you are constantly about a pixel away from softlocking and having to manually restart the stage (at the cost of a life). Shoddy, and dull at the very best.