Put the contents of a shuttered VHS store into a nuclear reactor along with Into The Breach and Advance Wars, and you’ll have Kaiju Wars, a fantastic turn-based strategy game about delaying doom or, better yet, taking it on a long tour of the desolate warehouse district, far from your town center. The general idea is that vividly colored, isometric tile-based towns are under siege from enormous cinematic monsters. As Mayor, it’s your responsibility to keep them busy until your chief scientist, the comfortingly stern-faced Dr. Wagner, can devise a potion that will repel kaiju.
The creatures cannot be defeated by force of arms; even if you are able to remove all six of the kaiju’s health bars, they will just withdraw into their lairs for a little while, occasionally coming out with additional skills. Instead, your role is to play a hybrid of speed bump and kaiju-bait, deceiving and frustrating the juggernauts while the boffins continue their mission of rescuing the Earth.
I’m not entirely sure which movie the game is based on, but there are four different kinds of kaiju in it: a hairy cousin of Godzilla, a very smug version of King Kong, a flying fire kaiju I call Brodan, and a burrowing snake kaiju that now rejoices in the name of Sir Tuskawiggle. While each has its own special qualities—Hairzilla like to battle at water, for example, while Smug Kong is obviously happiest when he’s on a map of a jungle—they are all prone to predictability. The twitching red eye of the kaiju indicates that it will always attempt to destroy the closest structure. To view the Kaiju’s journey and the percentage chance that it will travel to each square in the case that there are several viable paths, click on the monster. After you determine the Kaiju’s path, you may create friction by positioning your brave soldiers in a row like thumbtacks to deplete its health and possibly slow it down enough to give the target building an extra turn.
Units are identified by the type of Kaiju they target (airborne or ground-based) and by the amount of Counter damage they inflict when trodden upon. It goes without saying that those units won’t survive the process, so it’s a good thing they’re so inexpensive. You can quickly redeploy them for a little portion of their original cost, allowing you to stuff unlimited amounts of meat into the enormous, irate sausage machine that arrives at your door. As long as you have access to air bases, barracks, and a few structures that generate money, such offices. Once a certain percentage of the battlefield is covered in debris, you’ll probably run into financial difficulties later in each fight, but losing a unit has its worst drawback in terms of the time it takes to deploy reinforcements into position.
The labs that provide evidence for the anti-kaiju serum are, of course, the most valuable structures of all. The lab that houses Dr. Wagner is the most valued of these. The Kaiju, like many mega-monsters, have enigmatic human accomplices who want the good doctor’s head. These dirty, leviathan-loving traitors will use Dark Project cards every turn. These cards may do everything from light map squares on fire to unleashing kaiju mutations and lowering the security rating that your military infrastructure generates. The kaiju’s supporters will find Wagner’s lab and sic the beast on it if that security rating drops to zero, forcing you to remove her to another lab and halting all economic activity while she’s in travel.
Thankfully, you can each play a special Project card once. Each round, they are dealt in groups of three and vary from the simple but essential (construct another lab, restore three points of security) to the complex and possibly game-changing (prototype mecha fighters, army-wide improvements). The main change in Kaiju Wars from a hefty asymmetrical tactics game to an amazing puzzle series with a titan theme is the card system. The cards and troops that you and the kaiju may use define the challenges.
One mission puts you against Brodan in a highly wooded terrain to give you an idea of the range. You have a plenty of AA weapons, but in rugged terrain they can move no more than one tile every turn, whereas Brodan may move up to six. As it doubles back on itself, the kaiju heals itself in addition to posing a threat to your units and leaving a path of scorching tiles behind. As a result, you have to send in bushplanes to put out the fire while attempting to ground the kaiju so that your otherwise ineffective bombers can destroy it. You may do this by utilizing the few airlift cards available to move defenders between tall structures.
Above all, Kaiju Wars has an amazing sense of a monster movie rhythm. What at times appears to be a flimsy satire is actually a labor of love for a type of narrative that, similar to zombie films, most nerds can recite by heart.
In some areas, you need to repel Hairzilla completely without using an army. You may accomplish this by edging decoy bases together along the edge of the map and using a radar truck to follow Hairzilla to get extra research points. Chapter-ending boss bouts with a taxing research point requirement exist, where the kaiju retreats every four rounds and occasionally tags in another kaiju, making you reevaluate your strategy. In certain conflicts, you can use special cards to destroy damaged foundations and covertly rebuild laboratories after your opponent has crossed a valley. There are situations where you have to battle many kaiju at once, which truly puts the tiny map dimensions into harsh contrast.
It must be said that the element of randomness inherent in the card method somewhat ruins the ingenuity of these miniature puzzle labyrinths. While there are several winning techniques that may be employed in fight, there is usually only one that works best. Once that is found, it might be discouraging when the kaiju wins in the last seconds due to pure luck. Though it doesn’t necessarily mean that Kaiju Wars isn’t worth playing, it does trail Into The Breach, where opportunities increase exponentially with each round, making you want to try again. With the help of Ace units, whose stats you may increase in between missions with success medals, you can at least slightly alter the task configurations. For example, you might give a missile truck the ability to counterattack in order to make it a competitive defender. To promote replay, there are additional bonus objectives (such winning in seven turns) and more challenging levels.
Kaiju Wars is a visually captivating creation. It aims to have the dilapidated aesthetic of a B-movie, complete with unit designs that seem like they were taken out of a shoebox at a yardsale and event animations that appear to have been thrown together in Hypercard. Writing plays with this, with city dwellers shouting that they can “see the wires” and clownish conversations between eye-patched Kurt Russalikes and nerds in whitecoats making up the main plot. When you look closely, though, you’ll also notice that it’s quite exquisite and stunning. It’s characterized by electrifying primary-secondary color combinations and has many clever details, like the way the ocean tiles bubble up into self-contained tidal waves when the kaiju appear. It has a great sense of style: at the beginning of the quest, the map tiles fit together like they are meant to. I was always reminded of swisher, meta-fictional kaiju films like Godzilla: Singular Point because of all the gags about men in rubber costumes.
Above all, though, Kaiju Wars has an amazing sense of a monster movie’s rhythm. It always feels like the culmination of a desperate scheme hatched in the back of a racing Humvee, until your literally downtrodden cast of 16-bit expendables manages to break the creature’s stride, your tanks ramming its ankles so that your experimental laser can rumble into firing range. What at times appears to be a flimsy satire is actually a labor of love for a type of narrative that, similar to zombie films, most nerds can recite by heart. Forget dark organizations reminiscent of the Illuminati; the most ardent supporters of kaijus are undoubtedly their creators.