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Ever since Lepcis and I finished clearing out our first-impression game backlog, I’ve felt comfortable investing more time into games that aren’t good, but are interesting. Kaiju-A-GoGo is certainly one of those kinds of games.
The game has so much to offer–bright, cartoony monsters, a whole cast of wacky scientists and an entire globe of pristine cities just waiting for you to trash. Were you one of those kids who would spend an hour building a block or lego tower just so you could smash it down? Well, I was.
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty though. On the surface, all of this seems awesome. In practice… well, the game brings up the ever-interesting concept of artificial difficulty. Quickly put, your Kaiju (monster) can be roughly classified as belonging in one of five tiers, based on which tier of skills they have access to learn. There are also five tiers of cities, with increasing defenses along with the higher tier they are. See the relation?
And so the game starts off with a race against the clock. It’s your job to smash cities and gain resources, with one catch. The more notoriety (just called Reputation in-game) you have, the more concerned the world is going to be that you’re a threat. The more a threat you are, the faster they’re going to build up resistances against you. This means it’s probably in your best interest to lie a bit low early on and only pick on one continent at a time, expanding only after you’ve gotten your Kaiju settled a bit. While the game has no tutorial regarding these hidden mechanics (trial and error is your only friend here), this part of the game works decent enough.
After a smash-and-grab from a local city, you’ll take those resources back to your base and build things up. It’s simplistic, but provides a decent reprieve from endless building smashing. Here though, is where the problem lies. You see, cities can enter various levels of Defcon. Functionally, a when a city raises its Defcon level while you’re smashing it, its tier raises 1 level, and it gains access to the higher tier equipment. Your Kaiju, statistically can really only fight within its own tier and below. This comes as a surprise, since there are all of these interworking mechanics that build up your Kaiju in a statistical sense. Extra HP in certain circumstances, abilities that deal damage over time, extra stats for short periods of time–you get the picture. The implication is that the game wants you to play strategically when smashing a city. Fair enough, but the problem is each successive defcon tier is a total brick wall if it’s above your Kaiju’s skill level.
This is not taught in-game (there’s not really a tutorial for anything). This is a problem, since this is a rather obtuse mechanic. Because of all of these interlocking stats and abilities, you think as a player “Oh wow, they just raised the Defcon level! Things are going to get serious now!” and you’ll probably stick around to fight a little longer. You’ll die and you’ll think “Oh, I’m probably just not good enough at the game yet. I’ll try again!” And you’ll die again… and again… and again, until only after hours of play you’ll finally begin to realize, it is not statistically possible to fight against tiers that are higher than you. The math just simply doesn’t work. When you transfer to the next tier of skills, your Kaiju gains more HP, armor, etc. which is not just useful for fighting higher tier military vehicles, but mandatory. Vehicles that deal upwards of half your health in one volley suddenly start dealing next to nothing once you raise up to their tier. Lower level abilities that you tried to push to their extreme limit are laughably dwarfed by their higher tier counterparts. Once I discovered this, I realized that Kaiju-A-Gogo isn’t one full game–it’s five separate games (for the five tiers) that occassionally bleed into each other once you near the border of one tier or another.
Even if you were somehow able to push your Kaiju to the extreme limit in the early tiers and capture a city one attack earlier, you’ll save at best a few days, which become meaningless once you hit the higher tiers. For instance, Tier 1 skills take a couple days to train. Tier 5 skills take 40. Saving 3 days in the interim is meaningless. Which unfortunately brings us to the next issue–the training. OH THE TRAINING. A day takes about 2.5 seconds to pass in-game at the highest speed. Once your base is set up and you have a steady flow of resources coming in, there’s nothing left to do but train your Kaiju to learn new abilities.
This is fine in lowest Tier when training takes around 3 days (so about 8 seconds of wait time). But there are 102 skills for each monster in the game, and 32 of them are the highest tier skills, taking 40 days of training each. Some quick math–([32*40*2.5]/60) is 53 minutes. That means in order to train just the highest tier skills, you have to spend 53 REAL WORLD minutes of just watching time pass in-game. That doesn’t even count the time spent for all the other tiers of abilities, watching your Kaiju sluggishly walk across the map, waiting for time to pass while buildings build and resources come in, and having to fight off the Kaiju Defense Force which happens every 2 months after year 5. This, on top of the enormous trial-and-error required to even learn the game means that an insane amount of time in the game is just spent sitting around and waiting. And waiting. …and waiting.
Eventually, base defense and construction becomes a chores, resource management becomes monotonous and tedious, and at the end you’ll just be begging for the last few cities to surrender so that you can finally put the feather in your cap of having won the game. It makes me so sad to say all these negative things because there really are unique and creative ideas found within this game. Truly though, I can’t recommend that you play it to find them, as I’m assigning a PICD Tier 3 rating to the game. Just be happy you don’t have to wait 40 days to receive that Tier 3 rating from me, which is more than Kaiju-A-GoGo would do for you.
