Giants: Citizen Kabuto Review (no fat)

Game Description

It's not so often that you come across a game like Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and this is meant in the best way. The industry is becoming too bogged-down in standard gameplay modes. If you look at any FPS, TPS, TBS, RTS, RPG or any other particular genre, you generally see a bunch of games that all feel the same. Sure, some games look better, others sound better, others are more realistic, still other are more fun to play, but generally all are variations of the same overall model, without leaving in too much room for any originality.

This is where Giants gets its points. The formula for this time-waster is different, you take an action based FPS, throw in some real time strategy, add some racing elements in, throw in insane amounts of humour and the ability to control a monster the size of a sky scraper, and what it boils down to is Giants: Citizen Kabuto.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto Gameplay

While the plot of the game isn't meant to be taken seriously, don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Humour is present all around, especially in the storyline and that means Giants doesn't try to change your life like oh-so-many games do today. It just wants to entertain you, and it does that extremely well.

Initially, you control some high-tech race that was travelling through space but crashed exactly on the planet where all the action is happening in. This race is called the Meccaryns and they start out the game looking for survivors. The Meccs are a technologically superior race of men. However, the same thing cannot be said about their intellect. They rely a lot on guns, and travel all over the place with their jet packs.

Along the way you are aided by some companions, who sadly lack any sense of intelligence. It's one of the game's few shortcomings but it's a rare opportunity to see an NPC that's so stupid. Most of the missions are pretty short, but you can't save in the middle of a mission which makes for a lot of infuriating moments. The missions are also quite varied so there's little chance that you'll get bored quickly.

Later on you get to control Delphi, the daughter of the Reaper queen. Reapers are a race of females that inhabit the sea and have a lot of awesome magical tricks up their sleeves (David Blaine, eat your heart out :P ). They also use bows and various forms of arrows, but they aren't anywhere near as strong as their spells.

With both these races, the game adds in a strategy component, as you are supposed to use Smarties to build your base and defence (but don't expect too much strategy, after all the entire purpose is to entertain you.)

And last, but not least, there's Kabuto. Despite not having any portion of strategy or racing in the part of the game where you play Kabuto this is probably the most fun portion of the game. Kabuto is just one big blue scary monster. He'll squash his enemies, throw them against walls and he'll eat Smarties, quite a lot of them really. Again, you don't have any idea how satisfying an experience this can prove itself to be.

While there are some obvious issues with the AI, and the gameplay could stand some improvements in the racing parts, overall Giants is a really nice game to play. And that goes to prove that for a game to really shine, all it needs to be is fun.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto Graphics

This game really looks good, especially when it comes to the scenery. Couple that with the fact that you can reach just about any point on the map and you'll be looking at the view quite a lot in this game.

The characters are quite good, though there could be some improvement, but what really managed to impress were Delphi's spells. Besides being really efficient against your enemies, you'll look cool while you're doing them as well.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto Sounds

The game's sound is nice, with the voice acting leaving a highly positive impact. Most of the game's comedy springs from the way the characters voices are delivered. Effects and music are OK, and they could definitely be better but they could just as well be a lot worse. All, in all, they don't get in your way which is what most of today's games settle for.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto Multiplayer

The game's multiplayer component is flawed to the point where it's non playable (due to bugs or extremely excessive lag), therefore, not much can really be said about this part of the game. It's really a shame since it would have been fun to have all three races in combat against each other.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto 2cent

Despite a large slew of bugs, Giants: Citizen Kabuto turns out to be a really nice game, which will keep you very well entertained during most moments of gameplay. It's a shame however, that a game with such a great engine, which transcends the boundaries of typical gaming genres was pushed out the door before actually being fully completed. It's a shame because Giants is just so close to being a classic.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto Pricing

Giants currently ships with a price tag of $4.33.