Presentation is top-shelf, from the menu screens styled after a drive-in movie theater to the fully-orchestrated soundtrack recorded with real instruments. The graphics are among the best I’ve seen on the PS2 – crisp, clean monster models moving at a perfect 60fps. Even when the onscreen action is at its most hectic the engine never slows down. Ten monsters are available (eight available from startup, two unlockable) and the usual suspects are accounted for: giant ape, giant lizard, jumbo Japanese mecha, top secret Army robot run amok, ancient lava god, and more. There’s a story explaining how all these monsters came to be – something about aliens attacking and releasing some radioactive goo that created ten separate giant monsters – but it’s unimportant. The diverse character lineup rounds out a classy front-end that faithfully emulates the look and sound of the monster movie genre.

The game plays like Rampage in three dimensions. There are ten different cities in which you can raise havoc and wage war against other monsters. A volcano, an Army testing ground, a Vegas-like strip, an airfield, and even a UFO are yours to destroy. You can climb buildings to escape attacks, or bring them down on the heads of your opponents. Just about everything you see can be destroyed. In your gigantic hands automobiles become hand grenades, and radio antennas become javelins. The city is both your playground and your arsenal.

The controls for executing all of the above are flawless. A cursor automatically targets the nearest object (from cars and radio antennas to boulders and building fragments), and pressing the Circle button picks it up. Some objects can then be used as melee weapons by mashing the attack buttons, or simply thrown by pressing the Circle button once more. You can lock on to the nearest monster by pressing L1 and R1 which makes throwing projectiles much easier. Pressing Circle next to a building (in the air or on the ground) causes your monster to grab hold of the building, allowing you to scale it with ease.

The combat engine is surprisingly deep. Throws, counters, special moves, combos, juggles, stuns, dizzies, and other typical fighting game staples are all present. And yet the controls are simple enough for a beginner to learn within seconds. A number of multiplayer modes are available: elimination matches, free-for-alls, and simple one-on-one duels to the finish. There’s even a couple entertaining mini games available, including dodgeball and an amusing knock-off of Super Monkey Ball’s Monkey Target. It’s the sort of multiplayer game that can be played at a highly competitive level or just by a couple of drunken dormmates looking for a simple, uncomplicated, and destruction-filled time.

The single-player mode isn’t nearly as fulfilling, which is a shame because it has serious potential. Some of the levels are quite clever: one pits you against a band of electro-cyclops creatures that spawn from a nuclear power plant. To stop them you must smash the cooling towers and initiate a meltdown. Once you’ve nuked the power plant, you have to take down a gigantic mutated plant emerging from the rubble. Other levels are less interesting, pitting you against multiple monsters that relentlessly team up on you. This in itself wouldn’t be such a problem, but the enemy AI makes these battles more frustrating than fun. Monsters take turns thrashing you while their wounded allies snatch up all the health powerups, leading to an endless circle of beatdowns. Some boss encounters like the plant showdown described above are enjoyable yet challenging; others, particularly the final boss, are unbalanced to the extreme. Worst of all, the story mode doesn’t change based on your choice of character; once you beat the game you get to watch a cinema showing how your monster was born, but that’s it. A little more attention and tweaking could have made this part of the game outstanding, but instead it’s merely adequate.

There are plenty of replay incentives in the form of unlockable goodies – new monster skins, new characters, new stages, and new minigames – but you’ll have to play through the single-player story mode or survival mode to get them. So the appeal of these unlockables will mostly depend on how much you enjoy the single-player modes. It would have been nice if these items were unlockable through two-player mode as well.

War of the Monsters is an excellent two-player game, one of the best you’ll find on the PS2. The problem is that it could have been much more than that. A game this polished, this fun to play, deserves more: a better story mode, four-player capability, online play, something. If it had even one of these things it would have scored an entire grade higher and would be an instant classic. Instead, it’s just a decent game, worth a rental or even a purchase if you love monster movies or two-player fighting games, but no more.

· · · Sleeveboy