Toss Into The Breach and Advance Wars into a nucleus reactor with content of a disused VHS store, and you get Kaiju Wars – a brilliant turn-based strategy game about postponing the inevitable or the best, take it with you An extended tour of the uninhabited warehouse district, far from the city center. The gist: Huge movie monsters are attacking a series of brightly colored isometric tiled cities. As mayor, it’s your job to keep them busy until your chief scientist, the reassuring ax-wielding Dr. Wagner, can piece together a deworming serum.
You can’t defeat these creatures by force – even if you manage to chisel each monster’s six health bars, they’ll only retreat to their lair for a few turns, sometimes with additional abilities. Instead, you’re playing a hybrid of monster bait and speed bump here, misdirecting and inconvenient to Overmind, while the researchers continue their work to save the world.
There are four types of monsters in the game: Godzilla’s furry cousin, the incredibly smug version of Kong, the flying fire monster I call Brodan and now Rejoice in the name of Sir Tuska Vigor Inspiring Tunnel Snake Monster because I’m not quite sure which movie it’s based on. Each has unique traits—Hairzilla loves to fight at sea, while Smug Kong is of course happiest on the jungle map—but they all have one weakness: predictability. The monster will always try to destroy the nearest building, as shown by the twitching red eye. Click on the Kaiju to see its path, and the percentage chance that the monster will move to each individual square if there are several possible routes. Once you have an idea of the monster’s route, you can introduce friction, line up your heroic troops like pushpins to erode its health, and perhaps, slow it down enough for the target to build an extra turn.
Units differ in whether they attack air or ground monsters, and how much counter-attack damage they deal when stepped on. Needless to say, these units don’t survive the process, so they’re cheap too – instantly redeployable for a fraction of the initial purchase cost, allowing you to shovel endless amounts of meat into a giant rage sausage machine your door. Well, as long as you have airbases, barracks, and some currency producing buildings like offices at your disposal. Once a certain map percentage is rubble, you may run into money problems later in each battle, but the biggest downside to losing a unit is the time it takes to move reinforcements into position.
Of course, the most valuable building is the laboratory that provides research points for the anti-monster serum. The most valuable of these laboratories is Dr. Wagner’s residence. As is the case with the giant monsters, the monsters have mysterious human allies who are hunting down the good doctor’s head. Each turn, these filthy, Leviathan-loving traitors implement dark plan cards, ranging from lighting map tiles to unlocking monster mutations to Black Ops hacks that lower the security levels generated by military infrastructure. If the security level drops to zero, the monster’s supporters will find Wagner’s lab and kill the beast on it, forcing you to evacuate her to another lab, and all economic production will be delayed while she’s in transit.
Luckily, you can take turns playing special item cards. Play in groups of three each round, from the basic but crucial – building another lab, or restoring three-point security – to fancy and potential tide turns, such as prototype mech fighters and full army upgrades. The card system is a key mutation in Kaiju Wars’ transformation from a clunky asymmetrical tactical game to a series of brilliant Titan-themed puzzles, defined by the units and cards you and Kaiju use.
To give you an idea of the scope, a mission pits you against Brodan in a heavily forested map. You have spare AA guns, but they can only move one square over rough terrain, while Brodin can move up to six squares. The monster leaves a trail of burning tiles that not only threatens your units but heals the monster when it rolls over. So you’ll have to send out jungle planes to put out the flames, while using a limited airlift card to shuttle defenders between distant buildings, trying to ground the monster so your otherwise useless bomber can slam it.
On top of that, Monster Wars has a wonderful feel to the pacing of a monster movie…sometimes what seems like a weak parody is actually a serious work on a story, like a zombie movie, most nerds in the muscle understanding at the level of memory.
Elsewhere, you’ll have to stop Hairzilla with no troops at all, lure intruders by bolting a virtual base around the perimeter of the map, while shadowing it with radar trucks to generate bonus research points. End-of-chapter boss fights feature grueling research point quotas, where monsters retreat every four turns, sometimes flag another monster, etc., forcing you to rethink your tactics. Once your opponent staggers to the other end of the valley, you can use special cards to clear the ruined foundations and sneakily rebuild the lab. There are times when you have to fight several monsters at the same time, which does throw a modest map scale into punishing relief.
Granted, the ingenuity of these potted puzzle mazes is undermined by the random elements of the card system. While battles do support different winning strategies, there is usually an optimal solution, which when discovered, is frustrating when the luck of the draw hands victory to the monster at the last minute. It’s far from a deal breaker, but it puts Kaiju Wars behind Into The Breach, with the odds relentlessly increasing with each turn, leaving you eager to try again. You can at least change mission settings a bit with Ace units, and you can use Victory Medals to boost their stats between missions – for example, giving missile trucks the ability to counterattack, making them viable defenders. There are also bonus objectives (e.g. seven turns win) and a harder difficulty that encourages replay.
Kaiju Wars are a fun visual dessert. In a way it wants to look ramshackle like any B-movie, the event animations seem to be cobbled together in Hypercard, and the unit designs may have been dug out of a shoebox in a yard. The writing is fun – city dwellers shout that they can “see the wires,” while the overarching story includes an exchange of clowns between blindfold Kurt Roussalix and a geek in a white coat. But it’s also very striking and elegant when you look closely – defined by an electric primary colour combination with countless neat touches, like the ocean tiles foaming into individual tides when kaiju emerges. It has a real swagger feel: map tiles fall into place like self-assembling types at the start of a mission. For all the jokes about men in rubber suits, I often think of funky, meta-fictional monster movies like Godzilla: The Singularity.
Most importantly, though, Monster Wars has a wonderful feel to the rhythm of a monster movie. When your truly oppressed 16-bit consumable finally manages to break the creature’s stride, it’s always toward those third act reversals and concocts a desperate plan in the back of a racing Hummer. What occasionally looks like a simple parody is, in fact, an ardent fondness for a story that, like zombie movies, most nerds understand on a muscle memory level. Forget the nefarious Illuminati-style organization – kaijus’ most ardent followers must be the developers themselves.