During my trip to MCM London I was able to play several game demos from upcoming and newly released games. One of the games I found was Godzilla on PS4. It was tucked away by the Bandai Namco booth and unless you explored the area properly you probably wouldn’t have even noticed it was there; I didn’t expect to find this demo at all but I’m glad I did.
Developed and published by Bandai Namco the game was released in Japan in December last year and is due to release in North American and Europe in July. The game will be released on Playstation 3 and 4.
The demo involved an epic three monster battle between Godzilla, King Ghidorah and Space Godzilla. To begin with players spawned in a city and were able to rampage around destroying the city and kill the attacking military who weren’t to happy to have Godzilla stomping about. This was also a pretty good to chance to get the grips of controlling Godzilla and see how this version of the game responded.
The destruction element was a bit laggy; although it seemed like almost everything on the map could be destroyed and explode in an array of sparks, the result of tearing through buildings did cause some frame rate issues in the demo. It was still extremely satisfying though to rip through building with Godzilla’s tail or to charge into skyscrapers and watch the sparks fly.
King Ghidorah was the first enemy to spawn. The three headed dragon could shoot devastating force beams from each mouth like Godzilla can however you really don’t want to be hit by those beams. A few minutes after King Ghidorah spawned Space Godzilla would spawn in also; yes, we had to kill them both to win.
The combat was a bit clunky and it seemed like the best way to move quickly to charge which worked pretty well at avoiding attacks from the other kaiju or getting closer to attack. For those who don’t know ‘kaiju’ is the Japanese word for monster, Godzilla is a kaiju and there are many different types of kaiju.
There are four basic moves for combat; the charge, the energy breath, tail spin and a punch. It looked as though Godzilla could regenerate health in the demo which was really useful for fighting King Ghidorah especially.
The energy beam was difficult to get the hang of as sometimes Godzilla would shoot it in a straight line and other times he moved his head around chasing jets with it. It seemed as though there is an evolution aspect that allows players to level up Godzilla so hopefully there’s an option to make the energy beam a bit easier to control.
Space Godzilla wasn’t as much of a pain to deal with however after defeating the first kaiju players can expect their health to be relatively low so you may want to back out to try and regenerate a little bit before attempting to tackle the final one.
You can fight both monsters at the same time but I wouldn’t recommend it as they didn’t want to fight each other which was a little disappointing and makes dealing with them both a bit more difficult. Although Space Godzilla could damage King Ghidorah with one of his abilities it didn’t trigger any aggression between them so that is a potential strategy in dealing with both at the same time but fighting them together is very difficult.
Camera control was good, you could see through buildings with it which helped in tight spots when fighting the other kaiju and gave plenty of choice on the angle you want to view the epic battles in.
Overall the demo looked very promising despite it’s issues; it was a lot of fun to play and it was one of the few demos I had to return to a few times as I enjoyed the destruction element so much and became a little bit competitive against the other kaiju. This could definitely be game to keep an eye on and hopefully the frame rate issues with destroying buildings isn’t as annoying then.
Have you had a chance to play the demo yet? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments!