Giants Uprising
Platform: PC
Publisher/Developer: VARSAV Game Studios SA
MSRP: 19.99
Release Date: Released to Early Access

Giants Uprising is a game in early access, and this review in no way reflects what will hopefully be the finished product.

The Giants, accepting a deal similar to the one I did by playing this game

I wish this game was better.

There’s a power fantasy everyone’s had at some point in their lives of just destroying things. Stomping over buildings, squishing people you don’t like, roaring at the top of your lungs, and just straight-up destroying whole cities. It’s an excellent fantasy, a perfect way to release tension and get your feelings out on some tiny pixelated villagers. That’s what this game promises— a large, cathartic brawl through a medieval fantasy world as a huge, lumbering giant. You stomping your way through a cast of horrid villains and destroying siege machinery. While the promise of such a game is in there, Giants Uprising fails to deliver on a meaningful level. Not just with its laundry list of bugs, but with some fundamental issues that might not be solved. And that is possibly the most disappointing part.

Giants Uprising casts you as, well, a giant. Years in the past, giants and humans managed to coexist with each other, but the humans soon betrayed the giants, enslaving and tormenting them and taking their power and lands for themselves. At the start of Giants Uprising, you play one of these giants, enslaved and forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat. You and your human friend Kielbasa manage to fight your way free from the fight pits, starting a rampage all over the countryside. Your job is simple: rampage across the countryside, slam through buildings, wreck the enemy structures, and smash their armies to death. All very simple, all very violent, and all very fun, supposedly. As you rampage, you can also eat local wildlife and destroy buildings to regain health, pick up debris and throw it at others, and generally wreck most of the countryside.

Sounds fun, right? Well, it should be, for all intents and purposes. When you throw something and it connects, it’s beautiful how the scenery explodes and falls apart. You can stomp your way through whole armies as you cut a swath of destruction through the countryside. When it works, it’s really cool, and you can get some excellent effects out of it.

When it works.

Unfortunately, a lot of the game is sluggish and floaty. You spend your time trudging from place to place, even when you’re sprinting. Your stomp feels like you’re slamming your leg down through custard. That seems like a weird way to describe it, but it honestly looks and feels more like you’re swimming than anything else. Things feel disconnected, like you throw a punch and then the onscreen character decides whether or not they’re going to do it accurately. It’s honestly a frustrating way to deal with combat, which, when combined with the floaty controls and what seems like RNG-based hits, just makes everything a slog. Being a giant should feel like you’re a force for destruction, not a weird, floaty mess that can’t control its limbs all that well.

If this were an isolated problem, fine, but this combines with systems that just don’t really work all that well. You’re supposed to stomp on people and buildings to regain health, but in the heat of combat, the health gains you get are negligible. Picking up debris to throw it at your enemies sounds cool in theory, but in practice requires just too many movements and too much concentration to actually get right. You can quickly get shot down or overwhelmed by the constant swarm of enemies and projectiles while fighting the controls to get any kind of offense. Sure, a giant is big and slow, but a giant is also dangerous, and nothing about Giants Uprising feels particularly dangerous.

You might not have all day, but you’ll see this day a lot

Well, except for the checkpointing. In my time with Giants Uprising, I found myself having to play the tutorial over and over and over again. This wasn’t through any fault of my own skill (or lack thereof), but because the game’s malicious habit of crashing to desktop, combined with the godawful checkpointing that would sometimes put me back half a whole stage or force me to redo sections of the tutorial, just made it difficult to make any progress. When added atop the regular problems the game has, it just becomes too much. A slog on top of a slog.

Which also goes hand-in-hand with the game’s sense of scale. Nothing actually feels all that big, to be honest. You can stomp on buildings, but they come up pretty high on the character. You can stomp on and even pick up humans, but they just seem like, well, somewhat shorter versions of you. What should be an epic struggle feels like a punchup just outside a small town. A huge arena battle just feels claustrophobic. Sure, your sidekick during story mode is perched on your shoulder, but if the world just feels small, all the things meant to feel big and awesome just feel like set dressing.

All of this wouldn’t be so annoying if the game weren’t actually trying to produce something cool. The look of the game is fantastic, with its rough-hewn aesthetic, unique art style, and an interesting backstory that manages to completely subvert itself to Hell and back. When it actually tries to do something, the game could be said to be an accomplishment— the aesthetic is fantastic, the idea of finding creative ways to use the environment and your huge size against armies of foes, and the story that strikes the right balance between snarky and serious are all excellent and beyond reproach— but when actually playing the game is such an exercise in slow-paced frustration, you begin to wonder why you even bothered.

As they continue to patch the game, Giants Uprising has seen some improvements. Hopefully, by the time it comes completely out of Early Access, it’ll be more playable. But with the current state of things backing up a game that just…doesn’t really leap off the screen, this one’s far from a recommendation.

The Good:
- Interesting setting and rough-hewn “stonepunk” aesthetics
- Tone that strikes a balance between snarky and serious
- A lot of good ideas in combat decisions

The Bad:
- Frequent crashes to desktop
- Awful checkpointing means you play the same section over and over and over and over
- Sluggish controls
- No real sense of hit detection

Giants Uprising Review