Godzilla: The Game review — how can crushing towns as a huge monster be so dull?

PS3/PS4, £49.99, 3 stars

The first Godzilla games appeared in the 80s and it’s been a hard few decades for everyone's favourite metaphor for the danger of nuclear power. There have been some movies that were — well — not the easiest to get through. The games haven’t suffered so much: it would presumably take a lot of work to make a game in which you’re a giant monster crushing tanks and levelling buildings that isn’t at least a little bit fun.

Godzilla: The Game has been roaming around the games consoles of Japan for a year now and finally comes to our very own PS3s and PS4s this week, ready to shower us with kind of slow, kind of repetitive gameplay.

There are three modes: Destruction, King of the Monsters and Evolution. In Destruction, you take on stage after stage where the main objective is to destroy a number of G-Energy Generators, this being what created Godzilla in the first place and what Godzilla now craves. Your difficulty in these is set by which President the country has – the more liberal minded one who thinks we need to understand Godzilla, the moderate one, and the more gung-ho one. In King of the Monsters you face off against other Kaiju, getting ever more difficult; and in Evolution you give your monsters upgrades.

It all sounds good until you get down to the actual gameplay. Firstly, the only way to make your monster turn is using L1 and R1 and it is a labourious process. Because of this, you much prefer to face anything head on and the game descends quite quickly into button-bashing repetition.

A proper multiplayer may have saved it and made it a good game to have some friends over and laugh at while you beat each other’s ridiculous monsters. Instead, there is an online multiplayer, which takes away any semblance of living room social fun. It's much more rewarding when games are not "social" in the way most games are purporting to be social (with Facebook screenshots and tweets no one wants to tweet), but social in the way that means you can actually play and have fun with some friends.

In the end, the game gets through with the referential element. It's a Godzilla game, so it’s innately alright. Maybe when more people join the online multiplayer I’ll see the point in it. Until then, there are only so many times I can play essentially the same level over and over…