BeastLink Preview: A Multiplayer Action Game Where You Play as Godzilla

Asymmetric PvP modes have been around for a while: back in 2008's Left 4 Dead, some players could take control of special infected and hunt down the team of survivors. Later came projects built entirely around the clash between sides with fundamentally different abilities. In Dead by Daylight and Friday the 13th: The Game, one player becomes a killer; in Predator: Hunting Grounds — the Predator; in Evil Dead: The Game — a demon; in Depth — a killer shark; and in Secret Neighbor — the sinister Neighbor. The best games in the genre hook players with exactly this difference in roles: the "monster" and the "survivors" require completely different tactics, and even the perfect alien hunter can still end up vulnerable.

BeastLink continues experimenting with this formula, letting you step into the role of a kaiju — a giant monster straight out of Japanese films. Everyone knows the genre's most famous representative: Godzilla. The chance to level entire cities as a monster like that already sounds appealing.

Back in BeastLink's first announcements in 2025, the developers promised the game would have two full-fledged modes — a story campaign and multiplayer. You might wonder why an asymmetric action game even needs a story. It consists of a handful of missions and works more as a tutorial, letting you learn the game's core mechanics.

In the story, the world has been struck by a catastrophic epidemic, and the remnants of humanity have holed up in fortresses, trying to fight back against giant kaiju. At the start of a mission, though, looking at the neat city blocks, skyscrapers, and parked cars, you don't get any sense of a post-apocalypse at all. But by the end of a fight with a kaiju, once the monster has plowed through the whole location and turned the skyscrapers to rubble, you start to understand why humanity had to abandon its homes.

BeastLink is clearly inspired by Godzilla and other Japanese kaiju films, but it isn't officially tied to any known movie franchise. That means there's no actual Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra, or other classic monsters here. Instead of licensed characters, the developers created four original kaiju, each with its own set of abilities and its own required tactics.

The game's second big selling point after the kaiju themselves is the developers' advertised "super-destruction" tech: every object on the map can be reduced to dust. Playing as a kaiju, you can level entire buildings with a single swipe of a claw, while in a tank you can literally carve your way through buildings. And that carving isn't always voluntary — get too close to a kaiju and it'll grab your tank and hurl it across half the map, punching through the walls of skyscrapers with it like an improvised projectile.

You can get your fill of the story campaign in about half an hour. The missions are fairly repetitive, but there's no real point holding that against the game — the story isn't the main attraction here; the multiplayer is supposed to deliver the real fun.

As you'd expect from an asymmetric action game, BeastLink lets you play as both humans and kaiju. The core loop of its main multiplayer mode, Convergence, blends PvP and PvE elements.

All players start the match as infantry, who can team up and use firearms and military vehicles. While an AI-controlled kaiju tears through buildings, players compete with each other to collect Serum scattered across the map. Once a player gathers enough Serum, they form a mental Link with another dormant kaiju on the map. That's the moment PvE turns into PvP: the player is now a kaiju themselves, battling other player-controlled kaiju and the humans still on the ground.

As you can see, the game tries to take cues from the best action titles and combine mechanics so players don't get bored. It's a shame, then, that playing as a kaiju and playing as a human are nowhere near equally fun right now. Playing as the monsters is genuinely enjoyable, especially at first — kaiju are slow and clunky, but they let you satisfy all that destructive urge you've built up over a long workday.

Playing as a human, on the other hand, feels like an afterthought. The character is missing animations — getting into a car, for instance, isn't animated at all, and for some reason the game inserts a five-second pause beforehand to "pick the lock," though why that's necessary in a game about fighting giant monsters remains a mystery.

Vehicles in the game include tanks, APCs, helicopters, and planes — the player's main tools, without which dealing meaningful damage to a kaiju is basically impossible. They hit hard, but handling them feels close to steering a bowling ball rolling across ice.

It's a similar story with the weapons. Even the 4-shot rocket launcher doesn't deliver that satisfying impact when firing. There's no sense that you're unloading the game's most powerful weapon into a giant horned lizard, and you can't reload while running at all. Here's hoping that by release nobody remembers these Early Access growing pains.

BeastLink's developer is Grove Street Games, known — or maybe "infamous" is the better word — for its remakes of classic GTA entries (GTA: Trilogy — Definitive Edition). This is the studio's first attempt at building a relatively large game from scratch. And it jumped straight into the ambitious asymmetric-action genre, where the only way to succeed is to offer players something original.

Well, they did come up with an original concept: giant monsters plus total destructibility. All that's left is to see, in the finished version, how well they manage to pull it off.

In its current state, BeastLink is rough around the edges but intriguing. If it manages to build a big enough fanbase during its time in Early Access, its promised release in summer 2027 could give us another solid asymmetric action game.