Early Hours with…Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Tom's Comments: Right out of the box onto my harddrive, there are a few things about Giants that are immensely disappointing. Okay, no more size puns. I promise. Perhaps part of the problem is the enormous expections I had...sorry, that one wasn't intentional. At any rate, my disappointment might be an example that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Oops. Planet Shiny Moon For all intents and purposes, Giants is a Shiny release: it was created by a splinter group of former Shiny employees who formed Planet Moon Studios. It doesn't help that Interplay's last Shiny release, Sacrifice, was so good. Giants has Sacrifice's funky sensibility and rapid action, but the care and fine-tuning evident throughout Sacrifice are missing. I don't mind Giant's lack of an ingame save. It hasn't bothered me so far, although I'm only about fifteen missions into the first of three campaigns. The missions are actually slices of ongoing scenarios and they correspond to the places you'd probably save anyway. There are some longer base-building scenarios later in the campaigns, but the readme says you won't have to rebuild structures when you start a mission over. Besides, bases in Giants are more of a formality than a strategy. You can only build them in fixed places and your choices are mainly limited to where you place defensive turrets. In a world without voxels The artwork and the game engine are fantastic in the truest sense of the word. Giants looks out-of-this-world, but also serene and familiar. It's kind of like Infogrames' Outcast, but without the shimmering jostling voxels. The viewing distance allows for lovely long vistas with only a discrete fogging effect. The light is thick, beautiful, almost liquid. An invisible breeze sways palm fronds and ripples water. "It's Key West," one of my friends said when we sat down for a multiplayer game.
Perhaps the engine's greatest accomplishment is its flexible sense of scale. True to its name, Giants pits the mammoth Kabuto against fast gun-toters or spell-flingers. Games like Slave Zero have done something similar, but the scale was hard-coded into the level design. In Giants, you can be the big guy or the small guy and the world looms or shrivels accordingly. "Wait, stop shooting at me," the guy playing Kabuto in our LAN game called out, "I want to see how big I am." Then he'd rush out to one of the computers in the other room and we'd marvel at a creature six stories tall. "I've never seen anything like this in a computer game," someone said as Kabuto ran with giant strides across the countryside with two machine-gunning gyrocopters in pursuit. Put a Delphi in his huge paw and he's King Kong. Remember when Quake was supposed to have giant dragons? It's taken this long but here we have the scale that Carmack must have imagined. Height: 60 ft. -- Weight: 40,000 lbs. -- Speed: 6fps So what's missing? Stability, for one. Probably a third of all the multiplayer games I've tried, LAN and internet, end with a crash or unsync error, often with no indication to the host that something is wrong. On a TNT2 card, nearby textures have a dithered newsprint effect. The fonts are rough and ugly; on one of my Voodoo 3 cards, they're almost unreadable. Frame rates are jerky, especially when a full-grown Kabuto is rampaging across the land. And you'll find some horrible clipping problems when Kabuto melts into the landscape. I'm not a programmer, so I wouldn't know what optimized code is, but I doubt it runs like this. But the worst thing about Giants is that it doesn't give you many ways to play. The single player game is a linear set of scenarios. There is no skirmish mode. You cannot add computer players to multiplayer games. You can't even have the computer-controlled sidekicks who work so well in the single player game. If you buy the game and want to try Kabuto first -- and who wouldn't? -- you're out of luck. If you have a good multiplayer connection, you can hop online to play Kabuto, but the internet games I've tried have either crashed or everyone has quit in frustration because you can't beat the big guy without some team coordination. Where's the co-op for human Meccs and Reapers fighting against a computer controlled Kabuto. Why can't I flesh my team out with bots?
The single player storyline is amusing and the AI is impressive (enemies will take cover based on your axis of attack). But since Giants was clearly designed as a multiplayer-oriented RTS/team action game, it feels underdone without a skirmish mode. Perhaps the longer base-building missions will have some replayability. But to really flex Giants' long-term playability, Planet Moon has left players to contend with the vagaries of internet connections and unstable networking code. They came awfully close to delivering a complete and fulfilling package, but...oh look, it's almost Christmas... 'Tis the season I suspect Giants was another offering at the altar of the holiday retail gods. The changes to the color of blood and the hastily added bikini tops on the Reapers belie some confused last minute scrambling at Interplay and Planet Moon. Too bad they didn't spend their frantic final moments on more important matters. I'm really enjoying Giants and I look forward to playing through the entire game. But there's a ponderous sense throughout that it could have, indeed should have, been more than we've been given. Publisher: Interplay December 10, 2000 |
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