February is now officially over, but the shortest month off the year didn’t leave us hanging dry when it came to arcade news. One surprise that hit the wires yesterday is that LAI Games has begun shipping out their latest gun arcade game, Kaiju Rampage: The World of Monster Eye in North America. Let’s take a look at what this game has to offer the scene.
Kaiju Rampage
Kaiju Rampage is actually the third game in a sit-down gun shooting series that was created by Taiwanese company IGS and supported by Wahlap out of China (who developed the hardware side of things here). Known as Monster Eye, those previous games had saw a few sales in North America, although overall it would be limited compared to titles that might come from Raw Thrills or Sega. This is because there were no major distribution and marketing channels that carried the ME games, so it was easy for them to be overlooked. This is what they mean with the subtitle “The World of Monster Eye”.
Now, the chances of finding this shoots way up as LAI Games is giving the series a ‘soft reboot’ of a sort – same in-game ‘universe,’ but with a new name. It still exists as Monster Eye 3 over in Asia, but here it’ll have a fresh start under the Kaiju Rampage moniker. This is the first gun game that the company has released since Outnumbered back in 2020 (and as a bonus, both games are exclusive to arcades).
We first heard about this back in October, then got a chance to play it at IAAPA 2024. It’s a fun game that benefits from the team behind it already having a bit of experience in the field. Players control characters who are dealing with an outbreak of giant monsters who are destroying cities all around the world. They have a small support team who offers some occasional interaction, but for the most part it’s about blasting those creatures and racking up a high score. I haven’t seen how many levels are in the game, but LAI does mention that it has around 40 minutes of game time. Here’s 12 minutes of that as seen at IAAPA’24:
For the game that is available now, it comes with the cabinet as shown above, which has a pair of mounted guns (each uses integrated, dynamic LEDs for some cool effects), a motion base, a 65″ 4K screen, 5.1ch surround sound, and a gesture motion sensor to detect player body & hand movements. It also has a sensor on the back to detect people passing by so that the cabinet will flash and “roar” to draw attention.
It’s also notable that this is one of the few environmental game cabinets that is available, as we haven’t seen a lot of those over the past few years. I’ve not heard what the price is on Kaiju Rampage, but I do assume it would be in the high 10k/low 20k range as these games tend to be now. To find out for sure, contact your preferred LAI Games distributor and they can help you out.
What are your thoughts on this game? Have you had a chance to play it already?
