Fortnite‘s Godzilla Collab Absolutely Gets the Awe of Giant Monsters

At this point, it’s probably more realistic to lay out what franchises and brands Fortnite hasn’t crossed over with. Epic’s Battle Royale shooter is a melting pot of licensed absurdity, where Luke Skywalker and Hatsune Miku and perform an array of memetic dances on the virtual corpses of everyone from Goku to Ariana Grande. The homogenized ur-brand of it all makes it hard for the latest in a long line of announced crossovers to stand out at this point, but its latest with the world of Legendary’s “Monsterverse” is definitely a cut above the rest… and not just because it involves monsters taller than most things on Fortnite’s island map.

Late last week Epic and Legendary kicked off a big new collaboration as part of Fortnite’s latest season, bringing skins inspired by Godzilla vs. Kong and The New Empire to the shooter. But beyond that Godzilla (himself a bit of a crossover queen, as of late) now has a physical presence on Fortnite‘s map. Randomly at some point in a game, a massive portal can pop up somewhere on the island, and the first player to run through is transformed into Godzilla to lay waste to their foes. If you’re not Godzilla, you can ping bullet after bullet at the kaiju to try and deplete his healthbar, getting rewards if you end up doing the most damage. If you are Godzilla, you get to spend as much time as you’ve got slowly but surely stomping, heat-beaming, and skree-onking your way through the map, leaving a trail of smashed buildings and dead players in your wake.

What’s genuinely impressive about it all is that being on either end of this apocalyptic scenario is fun as hell. Godzilla is unwieldy and slow, but in a way that emphasizes the strength and scale you’re playing with, and the sheer carnage he can enact tearing through scenery or by melting players with blasts of his breath walks the fine line between feeling powerful enough to be threatening, but not so overwhelming as to be impossible to fight back against. But it’s when you’re on the ground that is the most fun, arguably: whether you’re miles away from Godzilla or perilously close to his ample stomping feet, Fortnite has absolutely nailed the feeling of scale you’d want out of such an encounter. The look is on point (well, in terms of replicating Legendary’s version of Big G), the sound design is on point, but it’s definitely the size and scope, almost unlike anything else Fortnite has done in years, that makes Godzilla feel so special.

You can see him almost across the map, as tall as some of the highest mountains on the island. Your screen judders as he moves closer, or when a neon-pink jolt of energy screeches past you. Regardless of which version of Fortnite‘s battle royale you’re in there’s a certain level of destructibility that’s part of the game’s dynamic, and Godzilla changes that entirely, capable of taking down whole buildings worth of cover in a blast. And again, as chaotic as it can be, there feels like a fairness to it all: the beams are potent, but slow enough that you can dramatically try to outrun the path they burn across the ground. Getting stomped by Godzilla is less about immediately squelching you and more about the displacement of it, sending you and anyone else nearby flying back, all the better to bask in the scale of it. It doesn’t feel unfair to go up against Godzilla, but he likewise doesn’t feel like a pushover as people vie to do the most damage to him, weaving yourself between their gunfire and Godzilla’s own irradiated bolts of heat ray in equal measure.

Fortnite‘s Godzilla has a sense of weight to him that jars with a lot of the breezy movement that otherwise defines the shooter (especially this season, which has re-implemented a lot more movement mechanics to make players feel brisker and capable of smoother traversal). He’s disruptive in the best sense: he might only be around for a few minutes in a match, if he has the chance to appear at all, but regardless of where you are, when he does show up, he commands attention. And what else should the King of All Monsters do, but demand that by his mere presence?

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