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Godzilla may still be a household name in the film industry, but when it comes to video games the King of the Monsters is less than well-known. This would be for good reason, seeing as how nearly each title that bears his name lacks any quality whatsoever (save for Destroy all Monsters Melee). Pipeworks is back with their third 3D fighter for the legendary Toho-made franchise, and though the Kaiju (Japanese for "giant monster") fandom hoped that this would be the one to truly elevate a mediocre trilogy, Unleashed fails; miserably.

Before the lynching begins, it’s fair to point out what the game does right. For all its worth, Unleashed doesn’t look half bad. The monster models in particular are well done, definitely better than the Xbox models from Godzilla: Save the Earth. Levels, though few in number, are cool because of the devastation that’s taken place in them; Sydney is frozen over, Seattle is plagued by volcanoes, New York City is completely flooded, and so on. This adds a lot of personality to each stage, and though they’re not much more than late-gen Gamecube graphics, they still look good. Another respectable feature is the 23-character roster, which contains a wide variety of monsters. It may be a large cast, but each Kaiju feels pretty different from one another, which is pretty impressive considering the number of fighters.

Yeah, that’s about where the good ends. This is particularly aggravating because the game has several great ideas, but rarely executes them well. One of the most notable is the story mode, which garnered the most attention prior to Unleashed’s release. Basically, giant crystals are popping up all over the earth and causing havoc to the environment and monsters, and it’s up to you to choose how to deal with them using your selected Kaiju. The plot is told by these dark, sketchy still drawings that are coupled with perhaps appropriately cheesy voice-acting, so don’t hope for anything even remotely cinematic.

Each chapter gives you the option to do whatever you want; destroy the city, fight the military, remove the dangerous crystals, fight (or don’t fight) whichever other Kaiju are around etc. Then, based on what you choose to do, you’ll begin to gain favor with some of the different factions that the monsters are divided into, while losing favor with others. For example, your status with the Global Self Defense Force will get better whenever you choose to destroy the crystals, while on another level you could worsen your status with the Alien Faction by helping Mothra beat up on King Ghidorah.

What does this all mean? Well, not a whole lot, because each level is virtually the same as all the others, so you won’t be missing out on much no matter what decision you make. The only real factor that changes significantly is what monsters will appear when.

Which leads to the game’s simply dreadful combat. Now, contrary to what was expected, the controls work pretty well. They’re not particularly intuitive, but they all function just fine (except for the terrible beam-aiming). The problem is that the fighting is plain boring. As imagined, these 300+ foot beasts move as slow as molasses, so the battles are anything but exhilarating. Lame attacks also come into play, with your characters having few moves that will consistently knock down or even produce a reaction out of your opponent. Basically you’ll be smashing the same button repeatedly as you punch or swipe endlessly, all the while your enemy barely moves. It’s the furthest thing from being visually appealing, and it’s not even because most of your attacks have no variety or even effectiveness. To make matters worse, the game doesn’t even make you try to execute more advanced styles of combat, since the enemy AI is as dumb as dirt.

It was nice to see Pipeworks make the campaign very nonlinear and open-ended, but the game just tries too hard to be an action/adventure for its own good. The simple truth is that you can’t create an engaging experience of that nature with slow, massive monsters that rarely even leave the ground most of the time. When you’re not mindlessly throwing haymakers at an opponent, you have to walk around and punch a bunch of crystals. Then when you do actually jump into a battle, you either have to deal with the terrible camera angles, the dull combat or the incredibly stupid enemies.