Gameplay

Gameplay

We mentioned that there was some RTS gameplay in Giants; this is experienced with the Meccs and the Reapers. Giants is not your traditional RTS though. There is very little building and resource management. Giants, essentially, has you build up a little base with walls and turret, after that it's back to the usual action-oriented gameplay. The only resources in this game are Vimp meat and the Smarties you need to build your base. Once you gather a few Smarties all you need is a little meat to keep them working. Once you're done constructing all your buildings you can just let the Smarties starve. The buildings themselves are mainly there to keep the base from being destroyed. If you could build a gift shoppe without a base, that is pretty much all you would need. This structure replenishes all your weapons and health; all the races except Kabuto need this.

Phear

A little problem

Moving along, the Delphi levels mix the action in with a slight bit of strategy, you also get to race around! Giants decided to show off how well their engine handled fast-paced racing action. In our opinion, these levels were amongst the most boring in the entire game. Aside from the level where you get a jet ski it's pretty much downhill until you finish the races. We don't know what compelled the developers to keep these levels in the game. They weren't really challenging or fun. The enemies win occasionally but for the most part you get enough missiles to keep them at bay the entire race.

Once you get to play as Kabuto all the stuff you learned in the previous levels is thrown out the door. Prepare yourself for nothing but action and more action. These levels were pretty fun, or maybe I'm just partial to smashing things.

Offspring

Munch Munch

Multiplayer

We never really got to try out the multiplayer aspect of Giants. We weren't quite sure if the game itself was broken or if it was just our firewall being a punk again. What we can tell you is that the game lacks a server browser, requiring the use of either GameSpy or Mplayer. All attempts to connect or host a game resulted in failure on our part. That's probably for the best, as the stories we have heard say the stability of the game in multiplayer is something to be desired. Most people can't manage to keep a game alive for more than ten minutes. Once again we can only pray for a patch to come out soon. Godspeed.

Stability

Unfortunately, Giants suffers many, many issues here people. Sadly, this game has more bugs in it than a festering corpse dipped in maggot eggs. I'll give the Giants crew props for addressing these problems ASAP, as a patch is slated to come out sometime this week. As it stands, Giants has not brought joy and laughter to many of the gaming folk online. We have seen multiple message board threads berate the polish of the game. The most striking comment pertaining to the compatibility of the game is with video cards -- it doesn't work too well with, and I quote, " insert non-NVIDIA based video card." (Well, if recent events have any bearing, there shouldn't be too many of those in the near future.)

Going through the Readme reaffirmed this situation. Everything other than two or three cards had issues with Giants. Don't get us wrong though, there are just as many threads praising as there are chastising. But we think even some of the happy consumers have their own rants.

Yan the samurai

Karate Kid!

If the video problems aren't bad enough, this game didn't ship with working 3D sound. The options are clearly visible in the sound options menu, but they are disabled because the 3D sound support is shaky at best. After rooting through the Readme, we discovered that you can indeed enable the 3D sound support, but we got strange errors after doing so and reverted back to stereo sound. Hopefully this will also be addressed in an upcoming patch.

In-game saves - lack thereof

We found quite a few people complaining about the lack of an in game save feature. A lot of the games coming out right now seem to be missing this altogether obvious facet. Thankfully most of the missions in this game aren't too long to just replay. Out of the fifty odd missions, there were a handful that were too long to replay outright. The RTS missions save you quite a bit of time by giving you all the buildings you had previously created if you die. However, if you exit the game entirely you have to start from scratch. Combine this with the amount of times Giants crashes in the RTS missions and you have lots and lots of angry people.