A very polished game, War Of The Monsters runs smoothly at 60fps, both in single player and multiplayer modes.

The camera works fine for good part of the game. It follows your character using a high from behind angle that make almost impossible feeling lost in the environments. Like in other fighting games with fully 3D arenas, when a big building comes in the way between you and your monster, it immediately becomes invisible, so that you can always look at your character with no need for the camera of constantly readjusting its position.

In multiplayer, a classic split screen mode lets both players freely roam into the environment; the two screens gently blend into a full screen when the two monsters are face-to-face, making the battle more exciting but also closer in feel to classic fighting games. A simple but brilliant idea, finely implemented into the game, even if sometimes we have experienced an excessive hesitation in the passage from split screen to full screen mode.

The monsters are well designed, and the hidden costumes are even more beautiful than the default ones. The models are solidly built, but they don't boast an amazingly high polygon count; and that's normal, considering the amount of CPU power used to render the big, fully interactive arenas. Animations are very smooth, and additional special effects - like the flowing energy on Kineticlops' body - were used on certain creatures.

The environments are fully destructible and richly detailed. The city levels are impressive, and try to recreate the feel of real-existing cities like Miami, Los Angeles or Tokyo. Dozens of skyscrapers, structures, and smaller objects like trees and streetlamps, are there to be completely destroyed by the monsters. The quality of the textures is surprisingly high, and together with flawless lighting effects and particle effects, give the game the look and the colors of an animated painted comic book.

The ant-sized people running through the streets and the many, many vehicles that you can grab, launch and destroy at your pleasure are also incredibly realistic. It's just impressive how Incog. Inc. managed to handle all the polygonal objects displayed on the screen with no influence on the framerate and on the quality of the textures.

Incog Inc. seems to give great attention to sounds in their games; Twisted Metal Black, with its eerie tunes, sounded terrific, and War Of The Monster follows exactly the same philosophy: soundtrack is one of the strongest resources to create and support the style of a gaming experience.

Those old sci-fi and horror Japanese and American movies about Godzilla, King Kong, UFOs, and so on, are, as I said, the artistic reference for the game. The themes, composed by a team of artists from Big Idea Music Productions, are clearly inspired by Max Steiner's soundtrack for the legendary King Kong movie directed by Shoedsack and Cooper in 1933, re-interpreted through the unique half modern-half classic style of Danny Elfman. Performed with full orchestra, the soundtrack makes a magnificent use of menacing percussions and drums to emphasize the size and the terrific power of the monsters, not without an evident tendency to "overdo" it, to add the touch of detached humor that stands behind the whole game.

Sound effects are also excellent; the cries of the monsters are frightening, the rumbling sound of a skyscraper falling on the ground is powerful, explosions are deafening… everything sounds monstrous as it should. And the shrieks of terror of dozens and dozens of those little humans are funny, considering you are the monster!

Many elements of the game design work against the longevity of War Of The Monsters. First of all, since all monsters play similarly, once you've mastered one of them, you'll be good at playing with all the others; the levels don't offer enough variety, and while the possibility to grab almost any object and use it against the enemy is great, on the long run it may get a bit repetitive and lead to boring long-range battles. The tough (tough, not smart) AI can be at first frustrating, then repetitive and simply not fun.

Anyhow, there are many reasons that could make you play this game for a longer time. First of all, the hidden costumes are too nice to remain locked. They completely change the appearance of the monster, and most of the times, they are even cooler than the default costume. There are also three 2-players mini-games that can be unlocked, but they add very little in terms of replay value.

The main 2-players game modes are great, but War Of The Monsters desperately calls for a four players mode, and better still for an online game mode. Let's just hope we'll see a War Of The Monsters: Online somewhere in the future.