Luke Owen reviews Godzilla: Strike Zone, available on iOS and Android…
It seems there is no stop to Godzilla’s reign right now. The King of the Monsters has taken an impressive haul at the box office and Legendary Pictures were quick to announce a sequel is currently in the works. To tie in with the movie’s release, Warner Bros have released a tie-in game for smartphones which sees you re-enact the Halo Jump sequence from the movie and the action that follows it. Godzilla: Strike Zone has its moments, but it’s not the best experience.
The game is split up into three missions. The first of which is the Halo Jump which uses your devices gyro controls to navigate yourself to the floor while avoiding hitting your comrades. One hit and you’re done so you will need to get good at guiding yourself away from your friends. The controls work well and are responsive and fluid (I was playing on an airplane and had no trouble). It will take a couple of tries to get used to, but it won’t take you any more than 3 or 4 attempts to reach the ground.
Once there, the second mission starts which switches the game to a first person perspective. The lack of on-screen guidance may leave you lost briefly, but once you pick up the basic controls you should be fine. Perhaps veteran smartphone first-person shooter players will experience a more “pick up and play” feel, but there isn’t much help for newcomers. Unlike the first mission, the controls here are pretty clunky and you will need to make for allowances in your timing to make sure you don’t make any mistakes. Worse still is when the game asks for you to complete jumping tasks which are tricky at the best of times. The mission itself isn’t tough and you won’t have to restart too many times, but it does wear thin on your hands and patience.
Annoyingly, the third mission is a repeat of the second only with different jumping tasks. Given the variety with the first two levels, it would have been nice for Warner Bros to given players a third play-mode for the final mission rather than repeating what they’ve already done. You certainly won’t feel short changed, but more variety would have been nice – considering the controls were so clunky.
Where Godzilla: Strike Zone does succeed though is in capturing the atmosphere and sounds of Gareth Edward’s movie. The Halo Jump sequence is just as cool as it is in the movie and the visuals you get as you fall to the ground are pretty spectacular. Likewise the first-person missions are equally impressive. There are a couple of moments where you are tasked with “out running” Godzilla and in these moments the game feels very immersive. In some respects it feels like a first person version of Day of Disaster on the Nintendo Wii and it shares a similar level of graphics. The music and sound design are also really impressive and a true highlight of the gaming experience.
It won’t take you too long to play through and there isn’t much replay value (time trials on the Halo Jump stage would have been nice), but Godzilla: Strike Zone is a good amount of fun. You can download it for free so it certainly wouldn’t hurt you to give it a try, but don’t expect anything great. It’s a shame that Warner Bros haven’t put together a fully-fledged Godzilla tie-in game, but this will do for now.
Godzilla: Strike Zone is available for iOS and Android. Read the 5 Things We Want From Godzilla 2.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
