• After humanity turned back an alien invasion, a strange green ooze leaked from crashed spaceships into the environment. From that ooze grew a set of gigantic monsters and now the biggest and strongest monsters are fighting each other. Humanity can only stand and watch in fear!

• Choose to play as any of 10 different monsters, from the robotic Ultra V to Preytor, the tremendous praying mantis

• Learn your combos and special moves and use them against the other monsters, as you demolish human cities

• The victorious monsters will get to test themselves against massive, deadly bosses for even more chaos and destruction

• Use the environment as a weapon -- hurl radio towers like javelins, or knock over buildings to bury your opponents

Ultra V will probably be everyones favorite. He's like using a transformer or samurai mech toy you had as a kid. Lazer eyes (Complete with the 'bzap bzap' sound effects), a plasma samurai sword and turbo boosters. Every monster I have seen so far is impressive. And, the intro is one of the best I have seen in a game in a long, long time.

The control system becomes 2nd nature within a few minutes of play and the camera is almost flawless. Playing the game with the mechs is an absolute blast. And it feels different then playing with the other monsters. It's hard to explian. Definitely, my favorite character is Ultra V. A Samurai Mech who knows Kung Fu, shoots lazers froms his eyes, has a grappling hookfor the classic 'Get Over Here' move', and a plasma sword. The sound effects of his jet boost are classic, and the metal impact his strikes and landings make are nothing short of spectacular. His Gundam voice has to be mentioned also. My friend has fallen in love with using Robo 47, the American Mech. A very cool robot if I do say so myself. Other cool ones are of course the lava monster, Magmo. Ultra powerful. The rock monster, Agamo who has the best voice in the game. His sound effects are amazing, youcan hear the rock against metal, or whatever surface he is hitting landing on.

The destruction of the city is amazing, eveything is destructible and it visually implemented to perfection. Smooth framrate throught the entire game, for both single and multiplayer modes. It's about as much fun as I have had with a game, maybe ever. It's hard to say whether it will go down as one of my all time faves, because I can't test it's staying power like that yet, but it's a blasr.

It feels like a monster movie come to life. I feel like a little kid playing it. As do my friends. Togera (the Godzilla/Beast from 20,000 feet below) has got to be one of the coolest looking monsters I have ever seen. Especially his Mecha-Togera outfit. His green fire breathe is cool as hell, a great special. I can say the same about all the monsters really. They are straight out of some great campy 50's Horror flic. The designers really captured that great work those old movies did, it makes your imagination feel great while you play. It's like a really great toy come to life. My friend I just got done playing a MARATHON session. We went at it tooth and nail late one night as his Ultra V took on my Robo-47 in an epic 'best of three' fight that took nearly an hour to complete. We unlocked a few secrets. The best being this (Not about Sweet Tooth, who is a secret character in the game!)....is that you can unlock skins! It's become apparent to me that the 4th version is either an entirely new design or an amazing offshoot to the original. This is a very cool treat in my opinion. Unlocking the 4th of each monster is almost like getting a new character. These aren't just skins, but new designs! Kudos to Incognito for including something so cool. And multiplayer, wow. Whereas bouts in most fighting games are over in a few minutes, you can make a single fight last for over 20 minutes. As you learn the levels, you start to understand how to best use the items, and can really keep things challenging. Health and energy icons spawn in specific locations to help make the fights about more than just beating on each other so their is endless replay value. This is some of the most fun I have had with a 'new' game in a long time.

25 of 30 found the following review helpful:


The game Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters wanted to be!  Dec 10, 2002 By Steven L. Kent "gamereader"
War of the Monsters is fast, frenetic, and incredibly fun! Players take control of a 50's-style monster movie monster. There's a glowing plasma creature with one great eye, a Kong-style gorilla, a lava monster, a distinctly American-style gargantuan robot, a sleeker Japanese-style robot, a giant praying mantice, and more.

Unlike the slow, hulking, Toyo Studios-style monsters in Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters, the beasts in War of the Monsters are fast and manueverable. These guys can scale buildings and leap from tower-to-tower.

They also use weapons, and it is amazingly cool. You can pick up a girder and use it like a bat. You can pick up a radio tower and hurl--impaling your opponent. This is Super Smash Bros. with fangs!

The game has enough options to give it semi-respectable depth.

The biggest drawback to this game happens to be Godzilla's greatest strength--four-player competition. Godzilla has it, War of the Monsters does not. You either battle the computer or a friend--a single friend.

You can place bots on the battlefield, but four-player or online battles would have been a great plus.

That said, Incog (formerly Incognito--the Utah company that created Twisted Metal Black), the Sony studio that made War of the Monsters, has done a great job with War of the Monsters.

Incog is establishing itself as one of the few great studios. They proved they could do car wars way back in their Singletrac days--The folks at Incog met at Singletrac, where they did Twisted Metal and Twisted Metal 2.

Sony probably made a great choice, a quiet game like War of the Monsters might well get overlooked during the Christmas rush. They delayed the game for a early 2003 release, and hopefully people will try and appreciate this totally groovy game.

7 of 8 found the following review helpful:


Where Oh Where Has this Monster title Gone?  Jan 14, 2005 By J. Ruehs
War of the Monsters is, hands down, the best Monster fighting game out there. Don't pay attention to what the original reviewer said about the "weaknesses" of the game concerning the freezing when paused or being backed into corner and all the nonsense. None of those problems occurred for me. The sad thing about this title is that you cannot find it anywhere anymore. For some reason it just did not take off, yet it is an all around awesome game that got high marks in the gamer mags. Purchase it used from Amazon it is definitely worth the buy. Don't spend your money buying Godzilla: Save the Earth unless you are a fan of the Godzilla genre. War of the Monsters is 100 times better than Godzilla: Save the Earth (although I do like this game). I guess this game just suffered a similar fate to Prince of Persia (great game, just no one was into buying it) although you can still find many copies of Prince of Persia for $19.99, whereas War of the Monsters has followed its biological examples into extinction history.

14 of 18 found the following review helpful:


A Fun, Albeit Short, Ride  Jan 29, 2003 By Dirty Ears K-Wal
A week ago, I bought War of the Monsters, and today I have just beat it. That is to say, I have unlocked every single character, skin, level, and minigame, as well as having beaten the game with every character in "Adventure" mode. I've had a great deal of fun playing it, but now it seems like there's very little else for me to do, except maybe play through all the difficulty levels or see how long I can last in endurance, although there's little to motivate me to do so.

Graphics 4/5: Very sharp, detailed character models and skins. The levels are equally detailed (and quite destructable). I really loved the fact that most of the skins weren't just "different colors" of the original monsters (each monster has 4 skins, 2 of which need to be unlocked via tokens earned in fights), but actually unique from one another for the most part.

Music/Sound 3/5: I really loved this soundtrack, reminded me a lot of the old 50s monster movies which I always a big fan of. The sound, on the other hand, gets fairly repititive, though that's a given in most fighting games. I played the games mostly on a mono TV, so I can't comment on the stereo sound, but I imagine it to be pretty sweet.

Gameplay 3/5: Gameplay is on the surface incredibly simple - 2 buttons to attack, 1 to throw, and 1 to jump - but is a bit more complex than that for those willing to experiment. When I first started to play, it was nothing but random button mashing, but then I realized that there were actually *combos* in the game. A lot of these combos are real simple, though there are a lot I havn't found yet. For example, the average simple combo is around 3 attacks, but I've gotten some as high as 9 hits, and there's the chance that there are even higher ones.

The environments in the game, probably one of the biggest draws, are almost completely destructable. Anything you see you can most likely grab, throw, destroy, and/or pound into the face of your opponent. It may take a while, but it's possible to completely annihalate every building on a level, which is both a strategic advantage and disadvantage.

There are three single player modes of gameplay: Adventure, where you take a monster through a "storyline" of sorts (though its the same storyline for every monster, so it gets a bit dull); Free-For-All, the classic...err, free-for-all in which you can fight up to 3 computer controlled opponents; and Endurance mode, where you see how long you can last with just one life against an endless supply of opponents (but only one at a time).

Most of the fights in Adventure mode can be a little frustrating at first, especially those with more than one opponent (I spent ages on the level with the Insect monster and the Robot Gorilla, but spent even longer when I had to fight two dragons...), but as you develop your skills, it becomes like a second nature. That still doesn't mean you'll die a frustrating death, but at least it won't happen quite so often.

Multiplayer 2/5: Multiplayer modes are the aforementioned free-for-all; Elimination, which is like free-for-all except its only two players and when you die you pick another monster to play as; and three mini-games, which can be unlocked but are quite pointless. If there had been more, maybe the mini-games would have been better, but with only three it's not really all that exciting.

The biggest drawback to multiplayer modes, however, is the fact you can only play with two players. With four players, multiplayer would be fantastic, and make War of the Monsters a great party game. However, with only two, it definately loses some of its appeal. I can understand why there's no online play (though it would have been really fun), but what's the explantion for no four player mode?

Replayability 2/5: Possibly the worst part about the game, which in the end is its downfall. When you first start the game, you have 2 skins for every monster, with 10 monsters, and a few levels. As you play through Adventure or Endurance mode, you'll earn Battle Tokens, which can be used to purchase more skins, 2 secret monsters (each with 3 skins you can unlock), 3 mini-games, and 4 secret levels. This would be all fine and dandy if it weren't so easy to get tokens or if the prices of the unlocks were more expensive. Believe me, you can have most of the secrets unlocked within a few days of casual playing.

What's worse is that there weren't more monsters to play as. Yes, you get different skins for each monster which make them look totally different and great (check out the Electric Eye's 4th skin for a great example), but at the core they're the same monster. The two secret monsters make up for this, but I felt there really should have been an even 20 monsters alltogether, secret or not.

As far as unlocks, there should have been much more of them, or Incog should have made it a lot tougher to get them. Where's the fun in getting secret stuff if it's incredibly easy?

Overall 3/5: I'm a little biased because I just love games with senseless violence and destruction, and the fact it has giant monsters resembling all those favorites from the golden era of monster movies makes me love the premise of the game. But overall, I felt that there could have been more. Maybe I'm expecting too much from a fighting game, but for the love of all that's holy, at least a fighting game like this should at least have four-player compatability! Rent the game first, you'll probably "complete" the game in a few days. See then if its really worth it to buy it. As for myself, despite its many shortcomings, I still think its great fun to play with a friend, even if it may be limited.

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:


Undoubtedly, the best monster fighting simulation ever  Jun 10, 2005 By Mojo Jojo
This game just kind of came and went without much notice, but it is exceptional in nearly every sense. The game play is fast and fun, easy to pick up, difficult to master. The monsters are all cool variations on creatures of the classic sci-fi films. And the graphics and sound are amazing.

What I love most about this game is the incredible attention to detail. The environments are huge, especially Metro City. I spent over fifteen minutes smashing it to bits and still hadn't destroyed everything. There are cars of every type, including police vehicles that have sirens you'll hear. And crowds of screaming people getting smooshed as your monster walks through them.

And the music is very cool. I don't normally care that much about music in video games, but it's got a great orchestral score that's not only beautiful, but actually matches the action! That's right. Punch a monster through a building, and you'll get a crashing sting. Don't do anything, and get an eerie bit of tense score filled with anticipation. It's like playing a movie!

I won't go into all the countless other great details: hurling tanker trucks, climbing skyscrapers, impaling your adversary with giant television antennae only to have them wrench it out and hurl it back. It just goes on and on.

The only bad thing about the game is even on Easy the CPU will kick your butt when you first start, which can be frustrating. And it would help if there were more play modes. I was hoping the sequel would be even better, but I doubt it'll ever get made. So pick this one up while you can.

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