Video Game / Kaiju Wars

Kaiju are approaching the city!

SEISMIC ACTIVITY DETECTED
Incoming! KAIJU

Kaiju Wars is a Retreaux-style Turn-Based Strategy game by Canada-based Foolish Mortal Games for PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. It was released on April 28, 2022 on Steam, where a demo is also available.

Players take on the role of the newly elected mayor of Floatio City. The timing of your new job cannot be any worse, because the Kaiju are emerging and threatening to lay the city to waste! Under the guidance of the brilliant Dr. Wagner, it is up to you to lay these giant beasts low and save the city, using everything at your disposal, from military might on land, in the sea, and in the skies, to experimental technology.

See also Into the Breach, another pixel-style strategy game about fighting kaiju.

Tropes

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• Arbitrary Weapon Range: The player's units, be they tanks, infantry squadrons, fighter jets or missile trucks, can only attack a kaiju that is adjacent to them. So in classic monster movie fashion, your vehicles are rolling right up to the kaiju and attacking it at point-blank range.
• Breath Weapon: Alphazaurus Prime has a nuclear breath attack that will destroy any structures and units in a two-space line.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Commander X, your black ops advisor, is a lanky man who almost looks like one of The Greys and speaks like an informercial narrator, but his services are nonetheless invaluable.
  • His odd manner of speaking is somewhat justified as it turns out Commander X is an alien agent in disguise.
• Cooldown: Unlike regular units, superweapons need time to be built and deployed. Even the quickest ones still take a good three turns to make under normal circumstances. And if they get destroyed, you'll have to wait just as long before you can redeploy them.
• Cooldown Manipulation: One Project card reduces the cooldown period on all superweapons that are currently in development by 2 turns, letting you field them much faster.
• Counter-Attack: Some (but not all) of the player's units can inflict counter damage when a Kaiju steps on them. In fact, some units do more damage by counterattacking than they do by attacking head-on.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: The kaiju typically have dozens of hit points at the start of a mission, while your units will generally die in a single hit and do 1-2 points of damage per attack. Even if you optimize the placement of your units to do as much damage per turn as possible, bringing the kaiju down will take a while.
• Energy Weapon: Two of the experimental anti-kaiju weapons you can build are the Freezer and the Maser Cannon.
• Evil Living Flames: Pterus Ignis is a phoenix-like kaiju made of living fire. While not necessarily evil, it is just as destructive as the other kaiju featured in the game, if not more so.
• Freeze Ray: The Freezer experimental weapon is a mobile cannon which fires beams of heat-sapping blue energy. It won't actually freeze a kaiju, but it will inflict some damage and lower their movement speed for a turn.
• Giant Flyer: Pterus Ignis is a flying kaiju resembling a winged serpent or a phoenix.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: Alphazaurus Prime's Tsunami ability lets it destroy an adjacent building and/or unit when starting its turn on an ocean tile. The animation depicts it sweeping its arm through the water to kick up a massive tidal wave.
• Glass Cannon: The Maser Cannon superweapon. It can inflict a tremendous 6 damage to grounded enemies before upgrades, but it's slow, just as fragile as your normal units, and can't counterattack at all.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: A unique example: instead of being prompted to give your name, you're instead prompted to enter your job title and honorific. You can set your job title as "Mayor", "President", or "First Minister", for example, and be addressed as "Sir/Ma'am", "Your Excellency", or "Great Leader".
  • Similarly, you can make nicknames for the kaiju as well, with Major Danger and Doctor Wagner letting you decide if you want to use their name ideas or pick your own.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: After the first act, a special election is held in Floatio following the back-to-back kaiju invasions. Unfortunately, the cost of protecting the city made you very unpopular among the people, and you are voted out. The good news is the good people of Bomb Bay City decide to vote you in, thus allowing you to continue fighting the kaiju.
• Home Field Advantage: Megalodonkus's Wily ability gives it multiple advantages on heavily forested maps. If it starts its turn on a forest tile, its movement speed gets increased for the turn. If it ends its turn on a forest tile, it has Damage Reduction against non-counter attacks. And whenever it destroys a building, it can shift into a random adjacent forest tile for free.
• Injured Vulnerability: All kaiju get slower as they lose their health bars, but Pterus Ignis is the only one which changes movement types too. It loses its ability to fly once it's down to its last health bar, leaving it vulnerable to units which can only attack (or do more damage to) ground-based kaiju.
• Instant-Win Condition: If reducing a kaiju's HP to zero isn't viable, another way to win a battle is to max out the Breakthrough gauge by keeping labs intact. Once the battle's Breakthrough limit is reached, the anti-kaiju serum will be deployed, driving off the kaiju and winning the day.
• It Only Works Once: Because the kaiju mutate at an exponential rate, each dose of the anti-kaiju serum is only good for one use, and a new batch must be prepared each time the kaiju return.
• Kaiju: They're here, they're big, they're dangerous, and they have to die!
• Killer Gorilla: Megadonkalus, the resident King Kong expy.
• Kill It with Ice: Downplayed. The Freezer doesn't inflict a lot of damage by default, its strength lying more in slowing kaiju down.
• Medium Awareness: The characters occasionally acknowledge the video game they are in.
• Medium Blending: Some cutscenes in the game take the form of live-action Breaking News Interruption sequences.
• Mega City: In the year 20XX, world nations have been replaced with sprawling metropolises.
• Multiple Life Bars: The Kaiju usually have two or more health bars at the start of any given mission, and they can gain more as they heal. Depleting these health bars will reduce the Kaiju's movement speed, while gaining new health bars will increase its speed. In Pterus Ignis's case, bringing it down to its last health bar will ground it, leaving it vulnerable to attack from ground-based units.
• Notzilla: Alphazaurus Prime is a clear Godzilla expy, albeit with a spiky mane, larger arms, and a longer snout that makes it look close to a giant hairy armadillo.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Reducing a kaiju's HP to zero doesn't kill it, but instead drives it away from the city. Dr. Wagner states outright that killing the kaiju may not even be possible: the best long-term solution for dealing with them is finding a way to peacefully coexist.
• No-Sell: Duggemundr's Carapace ability lets it ignore the first non-counter attack made against it each turn.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Most of the players' units go down in a single hit. Thankfully, they can be cheaply repaired and redeployed.
• Only Sane Woman: Among your advisors, Dr. Wagner is the only one who seems to have it all together, compared to Major Danger, a Dumb Muscle who advocates for simply throwing war machines at the kaiju; and Commander X, who is a Bunny-Ears Lawyer.
• The Phoenix: Pterus Ignis. On top of being a gigantic birdlike kaiju made of fire, it has a special ability which allows it to resurrect itself in a fiery explosion after being killed, albeit with low health.
• Primal Chest-Pound: Megalodonkus's Chest Beat ability heals it whenever it destroys a building. The animation for this ability depicts it beating its chest and roaring in triumph.
• Reduced Resource Cost: Some Project cards let you build a single army base or airport for free, saving you some much-needed money. Another Project card similarly repairs a damaged unit for free and lets you use that unit immediately instead of having to wait a turn.
• Red Herring: There are hints early on that the true culprit behind the kaiju attacks is Dr.Wagner, as the kaiju keep showing up wherever she goes. However, this is a misdirection as the real cause is extraterrestrial.
• Retreaux: The game emulates the look of old 1980s-era computers, in particular the ZX Spectrum.
• Sand Worm: Duggemundr resembles a gigantic armor-plated serpent with tusks and tiny arms ending in finned hands, its body never fully emerges from the ground, and it can burrow through the earth as quickly as the other kaiju can walk or fly.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ultraman is namedropped by civilians wondering where the hell he is during a kaiju incursion.
  • The Guncross Wing is named, and vaguely modelled after, the Wing Gundam. Its pilot, meanwhile is named "Shinji Ikari", with one of the Guncross Wing's deployment lines being "SHINJI! GET IN THE MECHA!".
  • Commander X introduces himself to Major Danger using the universal greeting: "Bah weep graaagnah wheep, ni-ni-bong".
  • At the end of Act 1, the Greater-Scope Villains debate what to call you and your advisors. Suggestions include "The A-Team" and "The Triforce".
• Show Within a Show: The main menu has several monitors that, in addition to showing in-universe Breaking News Interruption sequences, have clips from kaiju films that have entered the public domain, including (but not limited to) Gamera, Tarantula!, and even the oddball North Korean Godzilla knockoff Pulgasari.
• Situational Damage Attack: Infantry do extra counterattack damage if they didn't move on the turn before they were attacked.
• Supernatural Repellent: The anti-kaiju serum will immediately drive away kaiju when deployed. The main downside to the serum is that a new batch must be made whenever a kaiju reappears because they mutate at a rapid pace (and they can be picky eaters).
• Tail Slap: Alphazaurus Prime can use its Tail Swipe ability to instantly destroy one adjacent enemy unit at the start of its turn. Fortunately, it can only use this ability on enemies which aren't in its path.
• Tanks for Nothing: Downplayed. Tank squadrons are one of the basic units available to the player. Kaiju can flatten any given tank squadron with a single attack, but the tanks will do some damage as they're being destroyed and will slow the kaiju down for the rest of the turn. Presumably, stepping on a tank is the kaiju equivalent of stepping on a Lego brick. Even then, it's going to take a lot of tanks to bring down a kaiju.
• Transforming Mecha: The Guncross Wing is an experimental weapon that can be deployed against kaiju. It launches in its plane configuration, but upon taking a hit, transforms into a fighting robot.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: If Dr. Wagner is killed, the battle is lost. Players can keep Dr. Wagner alive by transferring her to another lab if the one she is in is in danger, but each turn that she isn't in a lab will prevent players from accruing money and Breakthrough progress.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Ultimately the aliens aren't out to kill or enslave humanity. They find the rare precious planets that can hold life, set up sensors and once a civilization starts polluting their planets too much kaiju awaken to set them back and try cleaner ways. The mayor, Wagner and Danger agree that maybe they are the bad guys but it should be their choice to learn to do better.
• Wind from Beneath My Wings: Pterus Ignis's Wind Force ability lets it destroy an adjacent flying unit by flapping its wings to create a hurricane-force wind.
• Your Head Asplode: When Tunnelmeister is defeated its defeat video shows it swallowing a missile causing its head to explode.