Introduction

Benjamin Franklin once said, "Beer is proof that God loves us." I suspect that Mr. Franklin meant to say, "Beer and British humor are proof that God loves us." Giants: Citizen Kabuto is a damn good reason why**. (In fairness to Mr. Franklin, few post-revolution Americans at the time considered the British to be "funny," besides the hats they wore during battle, a point that I will concede.)

I was extremely excited about this game coming out. I bought it almost immediately after its release, and after a certain jackass found that out, I was told to review it (just a tiny glimpse of how things work here, which should help you appreciate your own shitty job). No prob. I’m a cooperative and flexible little doormat. And hey, every other gaming site has reviewed this game, so why shouldn’t we?

Giants, the much ballyhooed 3D action title from Shiny offshoot and spiritual lovechild Planet Moon Studios, pits three vastly different races against each other in a struggle of Made-for-TV mini-series proportions on one pretty little waterlogged planet. It requires a 3D accelerator, and your S3 ViRGE DX doesn’t count.

Story

In a nutshell, the Sea Reapers used to be the dominant species on this nameless "Island" (which consists of a bunch of islands). They got together to construct a massive, semi-intelligent beast to protect themselves against potential extraterrestrial threats, which turned out to be a bit of a liability. Kabuto waxed philosophical and soon became a wee bit angry with his creators for his lonely existence. Like any good rebellious piece of Creation, he attempted to destroy his Maker(s). Thus, in an ironic twist on a (John) Miltonesque tale, the Sea Reapers were essentially exiled to the depths of the sea and, under the leadership of the evil Queen Sappho, have since been plotting their revenge. Only the cockney Meccaryns (Meccs for short), who happened to drop in to do repairs on their spacecraft while in search of a little boozin’ and lovin’ (the Planet New Orleans, or Majorca, or something), and Queen Sappho’s stubborn daughter Delphi stand in her evil path. The indigenous, helpless, ale-consuming Smarties will basically be enslaved if Sappho is not stopped. That, mind you, is bad.

Now that seems like a nice little story. But it is also a biting social commentary hidden beneath a tightly woven allegory which you probably missed. Since I am brilliant and generous, I will enlighten you as to what is really going on here:

The Island, the stage upon which this game unfolds, is our own beloved earth, minus all the people, pollution and landmass. Kabuto, the big, ugly, man-eating brute, is obviously Robert DeNiro. Queen Sappho and her minions are the unmistakable personification of the pre-revolution French bourgeoisie and her daughter, Delphi, is the fictional hybrid of Pollyanna and Stephen King’s Carrie. The Meccs, using their robot suits and voices to get laid, represent the Backstreet Boys. The Smarties, well, they’re Irish (who else would say "me balls are saggy"?).

So you have the "gang" of Backstreet Boys (with an aversion to uncensored displays of violence) helping Pollyanna/Carrie thwart the bourgeoisie before they enslave the Irish. Pretty much everyone wants to kill Robert DeNiro. Get it? Good lord, am I the only socially sensitive person alive? Moving on.

The story is told through cutscenes at the start and end of each mission. The game is laid out as a bit of a multiplayer trainer as well - a la Starcraft - where the first 1/3 of the game you are the Meccs, in the second 1/3 you are Delphi, and in the final 1/3, which sadly lacks any cutscenes at all, you are Kabuto. Besides being the deeply stratified and pointed treatise I described above, the game is pretty damn funny. I laughed me arse off. Ouch.

Gameplay

Kudos to the lads at Planet Moon for creating three fun and vastly different styles of gameplay: the Meccs, with their jetpacks and fancy shmancy technology; the Sea Reapers and their mysterious aquatic mysticism; Kabuto and breaking shit. I felt like I was getting three cool games for $16.67 each rather than one game for a whole $50. Three for the price of one!

There were some weird quirks and omissions to the gameplay as a whole. For one, I found no place to change difficulty settings. Not that the game was that hard, but I sure can’t give this to my cycloptic, one-armed grandfather. The various mission lengths were odd as well. Some were finished more quickly than they were loaded (I wish I was kidding). Some were rather long, which segues beautifully to my next point. As many have noted, THERE WAS NO GODDAMNED SAVE FEATURE. I thought we’d gotten past this childish way of game production, but I’m sure it’ll make those console ports more effortless. This wasn’t the problem of earth-shattering proportions that I make it out to be, but enough that I cursed the firstborn of the Planet Moon developer team for a good solid thirty minutes. Something I regret but could’ve been avoided, Planet Moon. (PMS Guys: I’m sorry your wife gave birth to a gecko, I had no idea my curses were that effective.)

The enemies in the game are generally well done. The Rippers look wonderfully frightening and can be rather nasty, but are easy to kill and make great cannon fodder. The Reaper Guards can be a pain at first, particularly in large numbers thanks to their high-powered rifles. Ultimately, though, they are manageable, especially as you get deeper into the game (since as a Mecc you have help, as a Reaper you have Spells of Mass Destruction, and as Kabuto you eat them for lunch, literally). The Raiks, the magical flying Reapers, are a serious thorn in the backside...too damn difficult if you ask me (especially in early Mecc or Reaper levels). But they’re sparse enough to be a challenge without sucking the life out of the game altogether. The giant beasts throughout the game were a visual delight and far too easy, but hey, it made me feel like I had a huge penis.

The Meccaryns

The Mecc missions were by far the most fun. Certainly the game’s novelty and beauty contributed to this, as I was drooling throughout the majority of the first five chapters. But flying around with a jetpack is just fun, especially the way PMS managed to implement it (an unlimited jetpack fuel cheat code would be neat, hint, hint). The weapons were pretty enough and packed enough punch, and the cutscenes really shined during this part of the game. The companion Meccs, picked up along the way, are extremely helpful, accurate, and never get lost or stuck. They can also "die" and come back a few times each during a mission. Quite possibly my favorite moment as a Mecc was the first time I had to go hunt Vimp meat for one of the locals. My sidekick and I dropped down behind a roaming pack of Vimps and fired. The pack took off like Mr. Subversive trying to escape a NAMBLA meeting before the media arrives, and so we had to fly just above them, chasing them into a luscious green valley and picking them off as fast as we could. It was beautiful. It was art.

Speaking of Mecc sidekicks, my one complaint there is that they couldn’t be individually deployed. This proved to royally suck on base building missions. I wanted to leave two guys back to protect the base and take two to pick up some Vimp meat and worker Smarties (more like indentured servitude than slavery, so it’s all good), but alas, no. It was all or nothing. So I left the dumbasses at the base to ward off enemies, a mission they approached with a strict "do not fire unless fired upon repeatedly" credo. They were best used at my side, I found.

Also on the subject of base building, I highly recommend not reading the part of the manual about the Mecc base. I got a great laugh out of the first and most important structure the Smarties built.

Delphi

The Reaper missions were a mix of bad and good. Bad: The Reaperski races (think Wave Race 64 with weapons and smaller waves). Good: Everything else. The spells in particular are a lot of fun. You can rain down hail, send waves of fire, freeze and then destroy individual enemies, cloak yourself, transport yourself (leaving a temporary decoy to confuse the adversary), and of course call down the beautiful and all-powerful twister. That thing is really damn cool. What better way to unleash death than to suck 10 or 20 baddies into the sky and then drop them from body-exploding heights? None.

But those Reaperski races. What the hell? They were boring. They were too long. There were too many of them. They were an extremely weak plot point, hardly suitable for a Baywatch episode. Did I mention they were boring? Bad filler, like in Twinkies Lite.

Other than that, Delphi was a blast. And she’s pretty good lookin’, too. There’s something about a sexy, scantily-clad, ass-kicking chick with a bit of sass that turns us guys on. So long as, when with me, she melts and becomes generally needy and horny, right fellas? (Assistant Editor Tweety- SOMEBODY has been eating a little too much red meat today).

Citizen Kabuto

I can see it now. It is about midnight on the eve of Giants going gold, and everyone is partying. Suddenly, in between loud tracks of Fatboy Slim, someone from Planet Moon sheepishly asks "by the way, did anyone make Kabuto single player levels?" Stunned looks are followed by a unified "SHIT!!!" as the whole dev team races to their workstations to hammer out the final 1/3 of the game.

Kabuto was all about missed potential. Man, he is cool. HUGE. Like 3D Rampage on steroids. He eats anything that moves, and can stick his dinner on some spikes protruding from his body to eat later (for emergency healing).

But after the chomping and stomping novelty wears off (it will), he is boring. There was little variance in gameplay during the Kabuto missions…just a lot of running around vast landscapes looking for crap to kill. Absolutely no story development related to Kabuto or even the rest of the game’s characters in "Meanwhile…"-type cutscenes. The missions were pointless other than teaching you how to use Kabuto. Go here. Break a wall. Go there. Break a wall. Eat a Smartie. Yay. Having fun?

And the Kabuto offspring (eat enough Smarties and Kabuto can assume a "bear in the woods" position and excrete a couple of eggs) were as pointless as a strip club that doesn’t permit bare breasts. Your offspring have to be manually told to attack a target, not an area like the Mecc disciples can. So there’s a swarm of a bajillion Reaper guards and you want help? No luck, unless you have time to constantly reassign targets for your two little Kabuto-brats whilst trying to avoid dying. Not gonna happen. They were moderately helpful for taking out turrets, but if the turret was on a small, tall hill or island, the little shit would probably get stuck without something to stand on (minor AI glitch). I stopped trying to use them very, very quickly.

WHY? Why must the coolest character of the game have been an insufficient and boring afterthought? Argh. Talk about disappointing. The final portion game was like a NASCAR race that won't end...you're still playing but it's all the same.

Multiplayer

Not bad, not great. I hopped on Mplayer a few times, but thanks to a bug on the server side (according to a pissed-off shareholder - so he said - in the chat room) most of us could not join games from the Giants lobby. So it served as private IP game recruitment. I jumped into a few, and to my surprise the lag was rather rare. So, unfortunately, was direct interaction with opposing players. The biggest game I played in totaled 6 players, and in the vast worlds of Giants this made combat too rare. And the speed at which those Reaperskis move, homing rockets were by far the most useful weapon. It's like playing in autopilot.

Um. Multiplayer is not a reason to buy this game, unless you’re gonna play with a bunch of people. Otherwise jump into a singleplayer mission with loads of enemies (in most they are produced endlessly), you’ll have a lot more fun.

Aesthetics

Oh my God.

You’ve seen pics and maybe a video or two. This game is the best reason to buy a GeForce or GeForce2 (or a Radeon once the new drivers are available…last I heard they were not, however) ever. Absolutely astonishing - down to some rather tiny details. You have to see this with an accelerator able to handle all of the bells and whistles, especially bumpmapping. Enough said.

Oh…I did try it with my Voodoo3. Err…it’s like looking on the game box and seeing a photo of a Viper, and then driving a Neon. You can see how great things could be, but the harsh reality is that, unless you get some new hardware, things really aren’t great.

This is meant to be enjoyed on relatively high-end video cards.

Sound

The music in the game is quite good, I’d buy the $10 soundtrack from Interplay if I ever got paid for this damn job.

The Meccs are accompanied by a bright and fanfarish orchestral score that Her Majesty would be proud of. Delphi gets a wonderful atmospheric choir with mysterious, sci-fi chords and melodies. Gorgeous. Kabuto gets a tense arrangement of brass and strings with tribal percussion - like from chase scenes in a Jurassic Park movie (which, by the way, someone is making a third installment of…ay me).

The music isn’t dynamic, though, best evidenced by the soft, slow beginning of the Mecc score when fighting a very perturbed Kabuto mano a mano at the end. Very strange. That and an AI bug I stumbled upon that turns Kabuto into a biteless guard dog, kinda took away from the drama of the big climax.

Also telling was the silence at the end of the credits. The first, gosh, maybe two-thirds of the credits featured music from the game. But the last, gee, 33% or so ended in silence. Kinda like they forgot to finish that last part up. At least this theme was consistent throughout.

The sound effects themselves are quite good. The voice acting is some of the best I've heard in quite some time. Weapons make big fun "BOOM!" sounds and Kabuto shakes the earth - as in, my apartment floor - when strolling about. Whomever was on the sound team deserves a nice pat on the rear from a good football coach.

Value

Well, as the game progresses, the Fun Factor^TM depreciates. However, at about 50 bucks (‘merican) it's pretty well worth it when compared to a few months of brain-killing Everquest. The Meccs are fun. Delphi has her moments. Kabuto is great fun for a little while. The graphics are simply intoxicating; I could just fly around in that game engine all day long.

The only real problem in terms of value is if you REALLY want to play it, but are on a Pentium II-400 with a Voodoo3 or TNT2, you’re looking at $50 + a new computer for a grand total of $A lot.

Conclusion

There were two minor stability issues I had. One (which was fixed by the patch) involved the game crashing while loading a level when I had my sound card removed. Most people probably won’t run into that anyway. Also, about two-thirds of the time I start the game (there’s that number again), the screen is vertically misaligned, with the top of the screen actually showing up at the bottom. A simple resolution change fixes this annoying little bug, but it’s worth noting.

All in all, Giants: Citizen Kabuto is the visual feast my lusty eyes have longed for with more jaw-dropping, "oh cool!" moments than your Amish neighbor might find at DisneyWorld. The game fell short in a couple of glaring ways, but all in all Planet Moon Studios produced a hilarious and entertaining romp.

Gameplay 3.5/5

That's 1.75 for the Meccs, 1.25 for the Reapers, and .5 for Kabuto Himself. Sorry Kabuto.

Aesthetics 4.5/5

I'd say I creamed in my pants, but I hate that sophomoric phrase. Just make sure you "borrow" your friend's GeForce.

Sound 4/5

You definitely want a sound card to play this game, and that's not just because it will crash if you don't have one.

Value 3.5/5

Might be time to upgrade that 286.

The Verdict 4/5

The disappointments born of high expectations are nicely outweighed by the innovation, pretty colors and British accents. Yay Planet Moon!

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