Eat Them! (PS3)
Video games can contain thought-provoking narratives, complex battle systems, and incredible tests of dexterity and problem solving, but sometimes all you want from a game is to watch a giant monster destroy some buildings. Eat Them! is going for that very simple primal desire, tapping into that compulsion to look at something built with care and smash it to pieces just for kicks. Since all the city damage and people eating in Eat Them! is restricted to the digital realm, you can indulge this basal urge without consequences, but even if you’re willing to approach this as just a way to mindlessly go wild as an enormous monster, Eat Them! isn’t quite the best host for such action.
The presentation is one of the most important aspects of a game going for the thrill of destruction, and the comic book inspired cel-shading of Eat Them! doesn’t necessarily feel like the best fit. The giant mutated monsters you play as all have a surprising amount of detail put into them even though their pieces can all be rearranged in the monster customizer, but even the game’s premade set of giants can be hard to parse due to all of the visual noise. This visual direction is definitely trying to make the giant creatures look somewhat grotesque and there are some good options for a creature’s head and special weapons to make it truly monstrous, but coherent design didn’t seem to be a priority so you won’t be bringing your own Godzilla to bear here. Whether or not the art direction clicks with you will certainly depend on what you want out of these enormous creatures, but there are some greater issues at play when it comes to visual clarity. Destroying buildings isn’t as easy as smacking them a bit or shooting them down, they have supports and various layers that need to be broken as well before they’ll fully crumble. Determining how much of a building needs to be destroyed to complete specific level objectives isn’t always easy, and even when a skyscraper has been stripped down to the bones it can feel like your attacks on the remaining pieces aren’t doing much damage. That destruction can at least be satisfying and explosive when it goes off right, but other times you might wonder why stomping on that bit of the building isn’t causing it to break down more.
The comic book style probably does a bigger disservice to the story though, the game trying to tell things in an odd mix of wordless scenes and homages to pulp comics. You’ll get a pre-level description to at least contextualize the bigger events, but the game also never really tries to explain who the mad scientist character behind everything is or what the PARP company did to him to deserve his ire. Things kick off when the PARP company reveals a new giant monster they made for some reason, and then a mad scientist that seems to be the player’s avatar in the tale takes control of it for a rampage through town. Following levels include rampages with different purposes like freeing minions from prison or supporting them as they rob city banks, but when you do have a final confrontation with PARP you still know very little about that company besides that they were likely involved in all the soldiers, tanks, mechs, and jetpack-using troops who show up to try and take your monsters down.
The unclear narrative wouldn’t be a problem if all you care for is the city smashing, but its presence almost feels a little deliberately confusing. The plot cutscenes don’t drag on long though so you can get into the destruction pretty quickly, each level taking place in a part of the city where you’re asked to complete different tasks as your giant monster. The most straightforward are definitely the destruction focused ones, the player needing to do a certain dollar value of property damage or break apart all the designated targets to earn different medal ranks. While progress through the adventure doesn’t require anything but completion of the levels, the medals tie into the unlock system for more monster parts so doing well does matter still. In some modes earning medals won’t be much of an issue like in the races that just involve picking your fastest monster and easily running through checkpoints in the town, and certain unique ones like getting zoo animals back to their pens barely challenge you since the human forces will only really start to bother your monster if the damage to the city racks up. Survival missions can hit on that issue as well as you can often avoid the military by just not doing much besides running around to run down the clock. Some stages do at least bring in entirely unique concepts like protecting a monster friendly protest, but a lot of mission ideas swing between being rather easy or not particularly interesting to participate in.
As you do get to later stages the time limits and requirements for success do start to tighten, and this is likely the game’s way to try and discourage use of its underpowered pre-built monsters. These giants can get you through the early stages easily enough, but making your own monster can really change how the later levels play, especially since getting the powerful unlocks early on can almost trivialize the final stages. For example, the final level can be grueling if you’re trying to use one of the game’s default options, but slap a railgun on your monster and suddenly the huge skyscraper that must be destroyed as part of that missions is vaporized so quickly it’s hard to imagine you ever struggled with it. The railgun does struggle in other mission types, the area layouts often incorporating different structures to ask for different approaches, but you can assemble tens of giant monsters and easily create ones to fulfill certain niches, not that the usual destruction requires that degree of work.
The environments you travel through do contain many of the large buildings you’d hope to tear down in a game concept like this, but there are definitely levels with only a small cluster of structures as tall as your monster. To try and break you away from just mashing the attack buttons to knock down everything in your path, different buildings require different approaches. If they’re much smaller than your monster you might want to get up on them and stomp, and if the building is rather wide, trying to smash it apart just by attacking its sides isn’t always the most efficient way of tearing it down. Still, you’re not going to really be asked to strategize unless you’re trying to make an underpowered monster work, but whether its the default set or a custom creation, their attacks types can have different use cases. There’s a button bound to your right arm and left arm each to allow for you to choose whichever limb is better for doing more damage. Since a beast can have regular limbs, bludgeons, or guns for arms, knowing when to use the limb good for smashing and swapping to the one good for blowing the arriving military forces away is useful but never so vital it feels like too much thought needs to be put into your monster choice.
In fact, when creating a creature, the most important details to focus on are usually damage output so they can more cleanly tear through the levels and their energy levels. Max Power determines how much health you have when a mission starts, but over time simply moving about or destroying the town will drain that health depending on the giant’s Power Use stat. Taking damage from enemy attacks wears it down as well, but your creature can scoop up citizenry and stuff them down its maw to get a health boost, the main loop of playing many stages being to smash away until you’re running low on reserves and scooping up people until you’re good to go again. You can intermingle eating and smashing but it doesn’t change the fact the basic gameplay wears thin fairly quickly, especially once you have the tools to make monsters who can just have their stats skewed so they don’t need to worry about health much or lean into a stat that makes them incredibly good for a specific mission type.
There is no giant monster on giant monster combat encouraged in the game, and while you can do the missions in co-op with up to three other people, hurting each other provides no benefit really nor are the clumsy swings and basic weaponry really up to the task of making such skirmishes exciting. Eat Them! does feel like it banks on the player’s natural destructive tendencies rather than keeping things fresh. Yes, you will be able to have those moments where you don’t need to think or worry as everything in your path folds with ease to the destructive might of your terrifying titan, but Eat Them! is hardly the first game to offer such options. The sometimes clunky maneuvering of your monster when trying to scoop up food or attack military opposition seems like it emerges from flawed mechanics rather than a desire to make the monsters feel like lumbering titans, but the raw effectiveness of your basic attacks elsewhere robs the experience of some of its initial yet brief luster. If you barely touch the game you might get that short term satisfaction on that visit, but the additional context and restrictions added if you decide to play even a few extra missions can start to wear away at that basic enjoyment.
THE VERDICT: If you want to lay waste to some cities as giant monsters, Eat Them! isn’t really the best host for it. It has some of the desired spectacle and some of the early missions are easy enough you can indulge in the mindless wanton carnage, but as the game introduces more missions types and starts requiring created monsters to really succeed it becomes less easy to forgive its flaws just because it’s nice to watch some things explode by your hands. Unexciting mission goals, a difficulty curve based solely on whether or not you’ve made a stable of overpowered monsters, and some issues with control and visual clarity all make Eat Them’s already thin systems start to rub against you wrong, and that honeymoon period of scooping up civilians to eat as you watch their city burn to the ground is replaced with the dull reality and frustrations of even a short term commitment to seeing what Eat Them! contains outside of its most basic stages.
And so, I give Eat Them! for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. I’ve seen Eat Them! compared to the Rampage arcade games that also starred giant monsters tearing down a city, and you can at least say they share a similar issue in that both can grow very stale if you stick with them for more than a few minutes. Eat Them! does attempt to diversify though, but the effectiveness of that comes up short again and again as anything outside of the basic destruction doesn’t feel like it gels with the game’s systems properly. Meanwhile, destruction goals can be harmed by the odd way structures react to your attacks and the capabilities of your monsters in general. Pushing you to make a custom monster to succeed isn’t necessarily bad, but by the time you get there the early levels were so easy that they give you too many tools to tear up the game’s final segments. Destruction can be a lot less fun when it’s too easy after all, and with ideas like the escorting the protest or saving zoo animals actually feeling like they require less action from the player despite their more unique goals, Eat Them! does feel like it can’t execute anything of greater depth than basic carnage.
Sometimes you do want to just toss all the rules aside and go nuts in a video game world with no repercussions. Being a giant people-eating monster who tears down huge buildings feels like it could have been a cathartic way of doing so, but Eat Them! can feel shallow when there’s too little structure and misguided when it is trying to introduce diverse level goals. If all you are looking for is a platform to go on a tear, it doesn’t feel like too much to ask that you do it as part of something that is otherwise a quality experience. Eat Them! may be able to make some of its carnage look visually impressive, but you can’t just put cake frosting on a brick and pretend it is just as good as a regular dessert. Seek your empty yet satisfying city destruction carbs elsewhere because Eat Them! relies too much on earning good faith through its most basic moments of play.