When I was a kid, my family had a trampoline in the backyard, one of those nifty things that’s great at getting people injured. For years, I’d play “Godzilla” on it with my brother and his friends, essentially fake wrestling with the added bonus of pretending to be giant monsters. As you can imagine, with a bunch of 7- to 15-year-old boys, things got a little excessive, and occasionally people would careen off the trampoline into all the deadly items waiting below. That’s basically what playing Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee feels like—a raucous fighting game focused on pure, distilled chaos and joy. The original 2002 game was one of the era’s most overlooked fighters, and Atari’s new remaster keeps everything that made it great while adding a delightful coat of paint.
Originally released on GameCube and Xbox, Destroy All Monsters Melee is a 3D brawler that, as weird as it might sound, plays a bit like Tekken. Two players face off as any number of kaiju from across the Godzilla series and duke it out, veritably flattening a city in the process. While much of what makes this game special is the pure spectacle and joy of destruction, it also has surprising depth as a brawler, especially when you factor in how differently each character plays.
I spent an ungodly amount of time playing the original GameCube version, hundreds of hours, honestly. At PAX West, I got to test out a quick three matches — and it felt like stepping into a time machine. Despite the heavily upgraded visuals, Destroy All Monsters Melee plays exactly as I remember it. Picking up that controller was like getting back on a bike for the first time in years.
The matches I played only had access to Godzilla and King Ghidorah, but that’s the definitive match-up anyway, right? You have a few options to take down your foe: heavy and light attacks, a ranged projectile, picking up buildings and throwing them, or picking up the enemy themselves. As you duke it out, human elements will try to defend the city, firing at you with tanks and helicopters, or even a special freeze beam that can lock you in place for a few seconds. At the same time, the city crumbles as the fight progresses. In my demo, we basically levelled every block of Seattle to rubble. Destroy All Monsters Melee is a joy to play in every way, with silky-smooth controls and a commitment to bombastic spectacle. Every move you make feels powerful and destructive, and that’s intentional. It plays into that kaiju fantasy perfectly.
The joy of this brawler is that you can jump in and have dumb fun, but also take it more seriously competitively with friends. Perhaps most surprisingly, Atari has made meaningful changes here, even though the game feels exactly like I remember. The graphical presentation is, of course, the most obvious, and it really works wonders here.
The visual presentation looks slick and leans into the design of Godzilla’s Heisei era in a smart way. On top of that, arenas have been made slightly larger to accommodate four-player brawls, there are new environmental variations for day/night and different weather conditions, and there are a few tweaks to the control scheme. But these are the kinds of changes you wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t know what to look for.
An Atari representative even tells me the development team got permission from Toho to add a new Mechagodzilla model to the game, since the version in the original game was from the wrong era. Further, I’m excited to have online multiplayer in the remaster, a streamlined unlock system to get more monsters sooner, and whatever other host of changes Atari has layered in.
Godzilla has always had a deep thematic undercurrent to the stories it tells, and while that element of the franchise has excelled in recent years, with the likes of Godzilla Minus One, the simple truth is that it’s also tremendous fun to smash kaiju together like action figures. The beauty of Godzilla has always been that the series can do both: be thematically and emotionally resonant, and big, loud fun. And in terms of the latter, I can’t think of a way I’d rather spend my November than laying the smackdown on King Ghidorah.
