Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered’ Demo Delivers a Roaring Good Time Without Relying on Nostalgia

All Monsters Attack

Although a devoted fan of the King of the Monsters, the writer was too young to experience Pipeworks Software’s trilogy of 3D kaiju fighters during their PS2/GameCube-era heyday, and so is not necessarily the intended audience for Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee Remastered, a remake of Pipeworks’ first entry from 2002. Still, after spending time with the Steam Next Fest demo, they report that nostalgia is not required to enjoy this classic made anew.

For readers who came to the Godzilla series through more recent entries such as the Hollywood Monsterverse, 2016’s Shin Godzilla, or 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, DAMM (the acronym the writer uses) may at first seem more than a little silly. The monsters look more like people in rubber suits than titans that once ruled the earth, and they fly around like ragdolls into the stratosphere when hit particularly hard. According to the writer, this is all very intentional, and it beautifully recreates the charm of the Showa (1954-1975) era of Godzilla films, in which the series moved from the utterly harrowing debut Gojira to the game’s namesake, an event movie in which a huge cast of monsters fought it out like action figures being slammed together. The writer says they cannot overstate how well the game captures the Showa era’s blend of silliness and seriousness.

Image credit: Pipeworks Software

As for the 1v1 monster-battling experience of the remake itself, it remains largely unchanged from the original game. The demo offers a singleplayer ‘Destruction’ mode that lets you pick a monster of your choosing to wreck an unsuspecting city — the demo would only let the writer choose Seattle as a stage, which they found kind of hilarious, along with the fate of that poor Space Needle — and earn a high score for causing as much mayhem as possible. The star of the show, though, is Versus, an arena mode that can be played locally, against CPU opponents, or online. The controls take a moment to get used to, with each monster feeling a bit sluggish (the writer is unsure whether this is intentional) but handling well once you understand that you’re simply going to keep pressing block by accident, forever. There are also pickups across the stage to give you or your opponent little boosts, including one displaying the Atari symbol that summons Mothra for an air strike. The online function, the writer says, seems to work decently well, playing out just as an offline versus match would, with only the occasional added jitter — though, admittedly, no connection indicator that they could see.

One thing the writer finds a tad odd about this demo is its choice of playable roster. It is obviously going to be very limited, so there are just three monsters to choose from: Godzilla, King Ghidorah and Gigan. The first two are a given, but Gigan confuses the writer — while definitely a popular monster, one of the remake’s selling points is the addition of Showa-era MechGodzilla, which previously didn’t appear in the series until the later Godzilla Unleashed. For a demo with a limited cast, the writer wonders why people can’t play as the one monster completely new to the game.

All that is to say, the writer really does recommend this demo whether you played the original or not. And if you like the vibe of kaiju smacking each other around, they also recommend watching a few of the Showa era films — starting with the original and going in release order, of course. The writer says it’s fun to watch in real time how Toho takes itself less and less seriously.