Review: Eat Them!

Eat Them! is a hack and slash monster-sized PSN downloadable from FluffyLogic games geared towards giving Japanese people the opportunity to terrorize comic book styled cities. It flips the coin on all of those Godzilla movies you’ve seen from the 60′s and 70′s, putting gamers in the shoes of a 50-story tall monster hell bent on wreaking havoc and eating pedestrians. Does Eat Them! crush the competition with its menacing claws, or fall face first onto the ground?

There really isn’t a whole lot of story to go along with Eat Them! so I’ll keep this short - A mad scientist has concocted all sorts of these huge Godzilla-like monsters in his lab to boost his personal pocketbook (or fund his huge lab, we really don’t know). Just remember throughout the game that you are a test-tube baby and how much you hate him. This should give you ample amounts of rage to pull from. After you get big and strong enough, you use your deformed appendages to bust open a high security prison. As you do this you watch the prisoners wreak havoc throughout the city streets and do your job to protect them (per the crazy scientist orders). These story-based missions were fun and varied, but after it was over the true details of the game came out. Repetitiveness.

The art style for Eat Them! is similar to the awesome cel-shaded look of 2K Game’s Borderlands. Everything in the game is nicely drawn and colorful, with certain aspects of the city popping out in great detail. The framerate holds true for everything going on the screen, as you’ll be breaking apart buildings, trees, parks, skyscrapers and cars to complete your missions. One of the downfalls for me from the game was the whole “Eat Them!” mentality.

In the game, you have a continually dropping health bar no matter what you are doing. If you are in the midst of an all-out military attack, or strolling through an inner city park, you’re still slowly dying. This design technique is handled by your monster character having to bend over and scoop up pedestrians and cops in order to feed yourself. I really do hate shit like this. Okay, so you need to have some sort of urgency right? So have the military and mech warriors in the game do a little more damage to me and only make me need to recharge my health every once in awhile? You’ll sit there all by yourself on the opposite side of the tracks and have trouble maintaining a proper amount of health. It eventually turns into the hunt for the nearest group of people to feed on, instead of destroying buildings (which is what you want to do).

Eat Them! supports 4-person local co-op split-screen. That’s nice and all, but having a more functional (instead of a wonky) camera would make it even better. Split this up into four even smaller boxes and you have a recipe for sickness. You can also do the better designed story missions with a few friends which is cool, and by adding a few buddies adds to the overall chaos you can achieve in Eat Them!.

That’s about where the positive stuff for Eat Them! pretty much runs out. The combo/button system could use some tweaking. I constantly felt that I was pressing buttons faster than the game could recognize and perform them on the screen. Sure, you could say that since I’m controlling a 32-ton genetically altered gila-monster, things aren’t up to lightning fast speed, but then when you grab the controller for a fun game and try to do a few combos you’ll quickly realize that you need to wait for the game to play catch up. Not good.

There’s a lot of game in Eat Them! for the $10 dollar downloadable price point. Sadly, after about the 3 hour mark of jumping and destroying buildings, it all starts to run together into the same thing after that. It’s fun for a few hours but the lack of depth cuts the game short. I would say that if you or a family member have been affected by an ancient nuclear modified lizard that destroyed your city, step into the monster’s shoes for a change. For everyone else though, Eat Them! is a decent game with some fun elements, but there are other games out there that need your ten dollars.