DAWN OF THE MONSTERS REVIEW

I keep running into people who love kaiju stuff and have never heard of Dawn of the Monsters. Every time it happens I get a little more confused. This game came out in March 2022, scored pretty well, had a proper console and PC release, and then just sort of... vanished into the algorithm graveyard. No big social media moment. No YouTube essay renaissance. Nothing.

Which is a shame, because after putting another run through it recently, I'm even more convinced it's one of the better kaiju games of the last few years. Not the biggest. Not the flashiest. But genuinely one of the best if you actually care about giant monsters smashing things in a way that feels good to play.

So let me tell you why, warts and all.

what dawn of the monsters actually is

Quick context for anyone who missed it. Dawn of the Monsters is a 2.5D side-scrolling beat-em-up from 13AM Games and WayForward, published by WayForward. You pick a kaiju (or mech, we'll get to that) and you walk from left to right punching smaller kaiju and big kaiju and occasionally buildings. Think Final Fight but everyone is four hundred feet tall and the camera keeps pulling back so you can see the scale of what you're wrecking.

The premise is that the world has been getting slammed by monsters called Nephilim for years and humanity finally has weapons that can fight back. Some of those weapons are mechs. Some of them are sympathetic kaiju who have turned on their own kind. You play through a campaign of missions across different regions of Earth, beating up increasingly upsetting creatures until you reach the big bad.

That's the skeleton. What hangs on it is where the game gets interesting.

the art style is the first thing you'll notice

Before you press a single button, Dawn of the Monsters looks like nothing else in its genre. The whole presentation leans on a comic book and manga aesthetic that feels hand-drawn rather than rendered. Heavy blacks. Flat color blocks. Exaggerated silhouettes. Panels that feel inked.

Cutscenes are literal comic pages. Dialogue boxes. Sound effect lettering that hangs in the air next to characters. The game pauses to show you a splash panel when something big happens, and it works because the art holds up to being held still. A lot of games try the comic book thing and it falls apart the moment you look at a frame in isolation. This one doesn't.

The in-game monsters keep the style going. Every kaiju has these thick dark outlines and chunky proportions that make them feel like they walked off a page. When you land a big hit there's a burst of graphic design energy across the screen, KAPOW-style effect text, color flashes, the works. It never gets old.

I will say the backgrounds are where the art budget clearly ran thin. You'll see the same chunks of city from a couple of angles across the campaign. But the monsters and effects are so consistently great that I genuinely didn't care after a while.

combat is where it earns the review

Here's where I stop being polite and start being a nerd about frame data.

Dawn of the Monsters gives each of its four playable characters a combat kit that's a lot deeper than the genre standard. You've got light and heavy attacks, a grab, a dodge, a counter system called Cataclysm that lets you punish telegraphed attacks, and a super meter that fuels big special moves. You can cancel basic attacks into specials. You can string grabs into combos. You can juggle smaller enemies. There's a proper combo counter that rewards you for keeping pressure on.

For a game that looks like it should be a mash-fest, the moment-to-moment feel is closer to something like God Hand or a light character action game than to a classic arcade brawler. It's not Devil May Cry. But it's a lot more intentional than the screenshots suggest.

The four characters all play very differently. Megadon is a big brute kaiju with huge slow swings and massive damage. Ganira is a crustacean-looking kaiju with faster lighter hits and her own rhythm. Aegis Prime is an anime-style mech who's basically the all-rounder Ryu. Tempest Galahad is another mech built around counters and zoning with ranged attacks. Each one shifts how the game plays enough that switching characters feels like starting a different game.

The part that surprised me on replay is how much the Cataclysm counter changes everything. Every enemy has a telegraphed attack that glows. Hit the counter button at the right moment and you get a big cinematic punish plus a meter refill. Once you internalize which attacks are counterable and which aren't, fights stop being about tanking damage and start being about baiting reads. That shift is what pushes this out of "fine beat-em-up" territory.

the kaiju and mech crossover is the best idea in the game

I want to give Dawn of the Monsters its flowers for a design choice I wish more games would steal. Half the playable roster is kaiju. Half is mechs. They're on the same team. You fight alongside and against both depending on the mission.

Most kaiju games pick a lane. You're Godzilla stomping a city or you're Jaeger drift-compatible punching a kaiju in the face. This one says why not both, and then actually builds the game around making that choice feel meaningful. The kaiju characters feel huge and heavy. The mechs feel tight and technical. Swapping between them forces you to totally rewire how you approach encounters.

The story leans into it too. The mech pilots are people. The kaiju have their own reasons for being on humanity's side, and some of those reasons get messy. It's not Shakespeare but the game clearly cares about what it means for a monster to choose to defend the things it used to destroy. For a brawler you can grab for twenty bucks on sale, that's more texture than you'd expect.

Dawn of the Monsters is basically a playable essay on that dynamic.

the loot system nobody saw coming

This is the thing every review flagged as a weird surprise, so let me flag it too. Dawn of the Monsters has a loot system. An actual gear loop with rarity tiers and stat modifiers.

After each mission you get rewards called DNA augments. These are modular upgrades you slot into your character between missions. Some are pure stat boosts. Some change how your moves work. Increased crit chance on grabs. Lifesteal on heavy attacks. Cooldown reduction on your super. Extra Cataclysm damage. There's a surprising amount of build-crafting you can do if you want to.

Is it a Diablo-tier loot grind? No. There's a manageable pool total and the best stuff is gated behind higher difficulty. But for a roughly thirty dollar kaiju brawler that's marketed on the box art of big monsters, the fact that you can actually spec into a crit-build Megadon or a parry-focused Galahad is wild. It rewards replay in a genre where replay value is usually "play it again on hard."

The thing I'll ding it for is that the menus to manage this stuff are a little rough. Sorting and comparison tools aren't great. If you're a loot-brain person you'll probably want a spreadsheet by mid-campaign. If you're not, you can mostly auto-equip and still clear everything.

how long it actually takes to beat

Campaign length is the honest weak point. A first run on normal difficulty is going to be somewhere between seven and nine hours depending on how thoroughly you poke around missions for collectibles. That's short by modern standards.

But here's my hot take. I think that length is correct for what this game is. Beat-em-ups that overstay their welcome are the worst thing in gaming. Every extra hour past the point where you've seen every enemy type is a slog, and the genre learned this lesson with Streets of Rage 4 which is also tight. Dawn of the Monsters doesn't pad. Missions are focused. Bosses show up regularly. When it ends, you feel like you got a full meal rather than a buffet you got tired of.

There's also a harder difficulty mode that unlocks after you finish, plus challenge modifiers and character-specific goals to chase. If you actually engage with the combat system you can put a lot more time into the game, not because you're forced to but because you want to. I'm on my third run and still finding combo extensions I hadn't tried.

co-op is the way to play if you can

Two-player couch co-op is here and it's great. One player on kaiju, one on mech, both punching the same Nephilim off the same screen. The chaos escalates fast because big special moves can obscure half the screen and suddenly nobody knows where anyone is. Which is correct, actually. Kaiju fights should be chaotic.

I played through most of my first run solo and most of my second with a friend on the couch. Co-op is funnier. Solo is more technical because you have space to read every enemy and plan your counters. Both are valid. Both are good.

The real shame is no online co-op. For a 2022 release that's a weird omission, and it's the single biggest asterisk I'd put on recommending the game to anyone who doesn't have a couch buddy.

honest pros and cons list

Let me put it plain.

Things this game does extremely well. The art style is genuinely unique and it's consistent across every screen. Combat has more depth than anyone expected and the Cataclysm system is smart design. Four playable characters that feel meaningfully different. A DNA augment system that rewards build experimentation. Campaign length that respects your time. Two-player couch co-op. The kaiju-plus-mech premise is delivered properly rather than as window dressing. The music is great, a proper orchestral score that sells every boss fight.

Things this game does not do well. Backgrounds repeat too often. Menus for gear management are clunky. No online co-op is a 2022 crime. The story mostly works but some characters feel thin and a couple of the human subplots could've been cut. Enemy variety dips in the middle third of the campaign where you fight a lot of the same Nephilim types. The final boss is a little anticlimactic compared to the middle stretch.

None of those negatives are dealbreakers. The positives genuinely outweigh them for anyone who walks in wanting a good kaiju game.

so why does nobody talk about it

Genuinely I don't know. It launched on every platform. It reviewed well. It was priced reasonably at around thirty bucks. It came out in a relatively quiet stretch for the genre.

My guess is a couple things stacked. WayForward is better known for Shantae so the audience overlap with kaiju fans isn't automatic. The marketing leaned on the art style which looked great in trailers but might have scanned as "stylized indie" to people who wanted photorealistic monster carnage. And 2022 was a packed year where a lot of small games got buried. Elden Ring was eating all the oxygen that spring. You know the story.

It's also not the game you expect from the premise. If someone says "giant kaiju beat-em-up" you probably picture a chaotic arcade smasher, and Dawn of the Monsters is a more careful, more systems-driven game than that. Some players bounced off it for not being simple enough. Others never bought it because they thought it looked too simple. It sat in the uncanny valley of expectation.

The result is a game that deserves a second life and hasn't gotten one. Which is part of why I'm writing this.

where it sits among kaiju games

If you're thinking about how this stacks up, my rough take is that it's one of the best pure-gameplay kaiju experiences currently on the market. Not the best kaiju game overall, because that crown has to account for scale and scope and Dawn is deliberately small. But best-in-class for what it is.

For broader coverage of the category, my full best kaiju games list covers the modern lineup. Dawn of the Monsters slots in as the one that's doing the side-scrolling action-RPG-lite angle better than anyone has before or since.

should you buy it

If any of the following describe you, yes.

You like beat-em-ups and wish more of them had real combat depth. You like kaiju and want a game that takes the concept seriously. You like comic book and manga-style art and appreciate when games commit to a visual style. You want a compact campaign that doesn't waste your time. You have a couch buddy who likes pressing buttons.

If you hate 2D games, want a fully open-world monster simulator, need online co-op to play with friends, or expect a hundred hour campaign, this isn't for you and that's fine.

For everyone else, it goes on sale regularly for well under fifteen bucks. That's a strong value in the kaiju genre right now. Buy it, play through once solo, play through once on a higher difficulty, then play through again in co-op. That's your summer of kaiju sorted.

closing thought

I keep coming back to the fact that Dawn of the Monsters feels like a game made by people who love the genre. Every design decision has a reason. The art is specific. The combat rewards attention. The premise is taken seriously. Nothing about it feels focus-grouped or compromised. It's just a confident, specific, well-crafted game about giant monsters that happens to be hiding in plain sight.

If you've read this far and you haven't played it, fix that. Tell a friend. Post about it. The best way to make sure the people who made this thing get to make another one is to actually play the one they already made.

Giant monsters deserve better than to be forgotten. So does this game.