Incog Inc. knows how to develop games with a unique atmosphere. Their Twisted Metal: Black - fifth instalment of the series that started on Psx when "Incog Inc." was still the "Single Track" development studio - fascinated thousands of players thanks to a well balanced gameplay, but also thanks to its unique eerie style, its atmosphere worth of a nightmare made of metal, terror, and darkness: not bad, for a car combat game.

In War Of The Monsters, Incog Inc. gives the player the chance of controlling 100-feet tall monsters that fight each other spreading terror and destruction across a dozen of levels. In many ways, War Of The Monsters is similar to Twisted Metal: Black. It's a fighting game that takes place on big fully destructible levels, it has game mechanics that are perfect for multiplayer modes, and it has a unique atmosphere that's immediately recognizable.

The game takes its style from the whole tradition of "Giant Monsters" movies. A tradition that started in literature, maybe with Conan Doyle's Lost World, continued on pulp fictions, and lead to King Kong, the amazing movie directed by Schoedsack and Cooper in 1933. After the World War II, in the first '50s, it seems that the success of an American movie like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, in which a dinosaur freed from the arctic ice attacked the city of New York, gave a brave Japanese producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, the idea of making a movie about a colossal radioactive monster attacking the city of Tokyo (a phantom of the atomic genocide of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?): that was the birth of Godzilla and of Kaiju movies (in Japanese, Kaiju means "strange beast" or "monster"). It's evident that Incog Inc. spent a long time studying these movies, and the result is a game that mixes the style of the classic King Kong movie with the feel of the amusing Kaiju movies.

The game features 10 different monsters; 8 of them are available from the beginning, the remaining 2 must be unlocked. Considering the wealth of playable characters of latest fighting games (even Twisted Metal: Black had 15 playable characters), 10 monsters aren't a big deal; it would have been great to have at least a couple of additional creatures to play with. Anyhow, the monsters designed by Incog. Inc for the game look great, and each has a set of four different costumes that can completely change its appearance.

Almost any creature has a resemblance with monsters that fans of Giant Monsters movies should know well; in particular, Congar and Togera look like the brothers of King Kong and Godzilla. Robo-47 and Ultra V are gigantic super robots, Agamo is an enormous stone monster, Magmo is a four-armed creature covered by the cooling of molten lava, Kineticlops is a one-eyed monster made of electricity, and Preytor is a gigantic insect. I'll not unveil the remaining two creatures here, but I should mention that if you have a Twisted Metal: Black save on your memory card, you can unlock a giant sized version of one of the Twisted Metal: Black characters. Which one? You guess. Ok, his name starts with an "S", he laughs too much, and he's creepy.

The game features three single player modes. In Adventure mode, the player must pick a monster and fight all the other monsters in the game through a series of encounters; you start with a "simple" one-on-one battle, but you soon find yourself fighting two, three enemies at once, while military vehicles try to shoot you down with their undersized weapons. There are also 3 boss battles that should add a bit of variety to the experience. If you successfully complete the Adventure mode, you'll be shown a nice (but short) CG movie that unveils the origins of the creature you've chosen.

In Free-for-all mode, you can fight against up to 3 CPU controlled enemies, select the "win mode" (sudden death, first to X wins), and choose a level to battle in. Endurance mode, like in any fighting game, asks you to play against all the monsters using just one life.

Like in Twisted Metal: Black, environments are protagonists in War Of The Monster. There are a dozen of fully destructible levels, varying from cities that look like Las Vegas, Miami, or Tokyo, to a volcanic tropical island, to a spaceship, and so on. The cities are easily the most spectacular and funny levels in the game; you can completely destroy any building, skyscraper, or structure you see, while frightened citizens run in the streets trying to escape from the fury of the monsters, and dozens of tiny cars, emergency vehicles, and helicopters move around you. Debris and almost any object can be picked up and used as close range weapons, or thrown as deadly projectiles. Certain objects, like long pipes or radio antennae can be thrown to impale your enemy: this causes big damage, and forces the creature not to move until it has extracted the bar from its own body (don't worry, that doesn't look as bloody as it sounds). Objects filled with petrol, like cars, trucks, but also military vehicles like helicopters and tanks, can be used like bombs, since they explode when they hit the enemy. And you shouldn't underestimate the power of classic huge rocks.

Controls are quite intuitive, even if the choice of using both shoulder buttons (L1 + R1) to lock onto an enemy is pretty strange, and at first may give some trouble to casual players. For the rest, the Left Stick moves your monster, the Right Stick moves the camera, Triangle and Square are the attack buttons, X is the Jump button, Circle lets you pick up objects, grab enemies, and throw them, but it also allow your monster to dig its claws and start climbing skyscrapers and buildings. R2 is used to block; pressing Triangle or Square while holding R2 just as the enemy is attacking you will let you counter the attack, stunning your opponent. All monsters have two special attacks that can be used when their Stamina Gauge is filled up: long range special attacks can be launched pressing Triangle and Circle simultaneously, short range special attacks - usually a spherical wave of energy irradiating from the monster - can be triggered pressing Square and X simultaneously.

Big monsters and fully destructible levels, supported by a smooth graphic engine, should have made of War Of The Monsters a memorable gaming experience. Unfortunately, the game lacks the balance and the sense of fun that characterized Incog Inc.'s masterpiece, Twisted Metal: Black.

The monsters look cool; but after all, how couldn't you love gigantic lizards or jumbo apes? Anyhow, after hours of button mashing with these gigantic happy fellows, I can say I know them well enough to say I'm disappointed. The first problems, the most "frivolous", regard the size and the movements of the creatures. To put it simply, these are half-sized giant monsters. The first Godzilla, the one in the movie directed by Ishiro Honda in 1954, was about 170-180 feet tall, but the monsters in the game don't seem to be higher than 80-90 feet; you know, that's not a secondary factor in a "Giant Monsters" game that should give you the feeling of being a gargantuan nightmare. The result is that, also because of the functional but unexciting high from behind camera angles, the creatures look a bit small, "lost" into the environments. Since I'm a picky bastard when it comes to the size of monsters and dinosaurs, I can also say that the monsters' head reaches "only" the sixth floor of a 50-storied skyscraper. The first time I played the game I frankly thought, "hey, they're not THAT big". Leaving aside this issue, that I admit might sound like a personal idiosyncrasy, it's worth mentioning that the monsters in the game are incredibly fast. Maybe too fast. The creatures of Kaiju movies move like men into terribly heavy plastic costumes; they're amazingly slow, but for this reason the spectator can feel the terrible mass of Godzilla and friends (or of the costume, if you prefer). In War Of The Monsters, the monsters can run faster than a car, they jump like rabbits and climb skyscrapers better than Spider-Man; it's obvious Incog Inc. wanted to make the gameplay faster, but controlling this (half-sized) giant monsters feels a bit like controlling Sonic The Hedgehog, and that's not exactly what you're expecting when you buy a game with an angry gigantic ape on the box cover. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, the good game released a while ago for GameCube, is much "slower" than War Of The Monsters, but it's an entirely enjoyable experience that perfectly recreates the feel of Kaiju movies - not to mention that it has bigger monsters.

Going to a more serious problem, the monsters play all the same. There is a very slight difference in their speed, but basically, once you've mastered the game with one of them, you'll be good at playing with all the others. Each monster has different combos, chains of attacks that cause higher damage, but those are rarely useful in multiplayer modes and are completely useless in single-player modes; more than elements well-implemented into the game mechanics, combos are just nice extras for hardcore players. Once you have a good grip of the controls, the two special attacks, together with a classic button mashing activity, are enough to defeat any opponent.

But it wouldn't be correct to say that War Of The Monsters is an easy game. The first time you'll be thrown into the battlefield, with no possibility of practicing the basic movements in a training mode, you might feel lost. The A.I. of the opponents is just unforgiving. They will relentlessly attack you, most of the times using long range attacks, throwing objects, or friendly trying to impale you. The first time I played the game I even confounded this toughness with smartness. Unfortunately, this is not the case, otherwise the Adventure mode would have been much better. As a matter of fact, the A.I. controlled opponents follow a very basic strategy: their #1 priority is attacking you, in any possible way; when their Health gauge is almost empty, their #1 priority becomes finding Health pick-ups, whose positions they seem to know perfectly; their whole "intelligence" is an alternation of these two "moments". But unlike them, you are a human, and you can learn from your own errors. That's why after your first campaign through the Adventure mode, with its good dose of frustration caused by the cheap obsession of the CPU opponents with using unavoidable long-range attacks, you'll be good enough to turn the situation to your own advantage. Since the Adventure mode remains the same regardless of the monster you've chosen - same encounters, same enemies, and same difficulties - you'll soon get used to the predictable strategy of your opponents. Adding to that, the three bosses follow simple patterns, typical of the boss battles of classic platform games, that once discovered make the battle as easy as repeating the same series of actions over and over again, until the boss is finally dead. Simply put, if the Adventure mode might seem at first incredibly tough, it soon gets repetitive, boring, and stupidly easy for players used to any sort of average fighting or action game.

This happens also because of other limits in the game design. The CPU controlled opponents take full advantage of these "gaps"; in multiplayer, these limits give the player the chance of playing cheaply. The most annoying is the excessive importance given to long range attacks. As I said, in War Of The Monster you can throw almost any object at the enemy, but you also have long range attacks that can be easily performed with the Square button when the enemy is away from you; the quantity of the long-range attacks is theoretically limited by the Stamina gauge, which depletes while you use them; with an empty Stamina gauge the monster is temporarily stunned, and it can't attack. Anyhow, since the Stamina Gauge automatically refills in part with time, and can be filled up with pick-ups and throwing objects (like cars, radio antennas, etc. etc.), this limit is almost meaningless. It's sufficient to shoot a dozen of times, wait a couple of seconds, and you have again enough Stamina to shoot your enemy. It's not difficult to realize that Incog Inc. wanted to create a non-stop gaming experience similar to Twisted Metal: Black, but that relentless rhythm doesn't seem to work here. All long-range attacks can't be stopped, and they are almost unavoidable, and this can make your games more frustrating than fun.

These issues have a bad influence on all the single-player modes, but they affect only in part the multiplayer modes. Played with a player that can do something more than button mashing or using long-range attacks all the time, War Of The Monster can be an exciting experience.

The game features only 2-players game modes; and it's a shame considering the very limited replay value of the single player modes. It would have been great to have the chance of playing against up to three other players in split screen, or at least via an I. Link connection, with two separate consoles and TVs. Not to mention that an online mode, even a very basic one, would have been more than welcome.

This said, the 2-players modes are the best way to enjoy War Of The Monsters. In Free-for-all you can fight against a friend, select up to two CPU controlled opponents, to simulate a four players game, and select the stage where you want to battle. In Elimination, you must select a number of rounds: every time a monster is killed, the defeated player must choose another creature until the end of the respawns.

Sorry to say the levels don't offer a great variety in the multiplayer mode. They work fine in single player, since you have little time to explore them with all the enemies constantly attacking you, but in multiplayer they seem to all offer the same repetitive experience. The layouts are deprived of the surprises you could find in the multi-level arenas of Twisted Metal: Black, and even the biggest levels seem a bit too limited in size.

And that's maybe the best way to describe the gameplay of War Of The Monsters: too limited. The possibility to completely destroy any building in the levels is spectacularly realized, and makes this game different from any other fighting title available on Playstation 2. But this is not enough to make a good game. The monsters play all the same, the A.I. of the enemies is repetitive and frustrating, only 2-players can play in multiplayer mode, and overall the game seems to lack the balance and depth needed to be truly fun for more than a few hours.