e take a look at Giants Uprising, which has a very interesting structure, after its release and examine it in detail.
Founded in 2016, VARSAV Game Studios, a small video game developer based in Poland, released its new game Giants Uprising as early access for PC on November 2, 2021. We take a look at Giants Uprising, an action RPG set in the middle ages, after its release and examine it in detail.
Giants Uprising review
The story of the giants
Giants Uprising manages to fool us when we first open the game and show that the storytelling is really high quality. I would like to briefly tell you about the story of the game, as stated in the description sections and trailers. The game takes place in a universe where giants rule, dating back long before humans descended to the world. Giants living in a great order have established their own countries, cities, and therefore towns.
The order that slowly begins to change with the arrival of humans also seriously affects the giants. The perspective of humanity, “Those who are not like us are our enemies”, is beautifully reflected in Giants Uprising, and the war between humanity and the giants is the subject. Normally at peace with the giants, humans take advantage of their wisdom and gradually become stronger, then betray the giants and enslave them.
The game also has a very stylish cinematic trailer for this cliché but very interesting story. I will place it below. We play as a giant who is completely enslaved but freed from his chains. Our anger and hatred for revenge against humanity grows stronger and we destroy everything. Giants Uprising is a production that is exactly about such a period.
It’s impossible not to get excited after watching this amazing looking cinematic trailer. That’s exactly how excited I was after this trailer. Although I wasn’t expecting a AAA quality production or revolutionary gameplay mechanics, I was at least expecting a ‘playable’ game. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Giants Uprising has a nice storytelling and beautiful visuals, but it’s not a game that’s ‘playable’ yet .
Before I talk about the negative aspects of the game that can be compensated for later, I will talk about the ones that unfortunately cannot be compensated for. Although the Giants Uprising project sounds interesting at first, it is the product of an idea that requires taking big risks. The reason I see this idea as ‘risky’ is because of the potential for endless repetition. We play as a giant, that’s all well and good. Our goal is to take revenge on people, that’s all well and good. So what are we going to do with this giant?
From the moment we start the game, we are faced with a structure that starts to repeat. Crush people, destroy houses, destroy towers and destroy the place. What do we do after this cycle? Crush people again, destroy houses, destroy towers and destroy the place. And then? The game is repeating so much now… When I closed my computer and got up from my chair, I started to feel like I was crushing people while walking.
The light among the negativities
Before I start talking about the other negative aspects of the game in detail, I want to take a short ‘positive aspects’ break. Unfortunately, it will be a bit short. I really liked the visual structure of the game. It has a better visual than I expected. Also, the part I liked the most was the studio’s storytelling style. VARSAV Game Studios has a potential in terms of storytelling. They can create really nice dialogues with small cinematics and draw the players into the game with these dialogues.
Also, the voice actors they found did a great job. When I looked at the studio’s other games, I saw that they focused more on ‘adventure’ genre productions. I think they should focus on genres where the story is at the forefront. Since we mentioned that the graphics are adequate, let’s talk about how inadequate the animations are.Giants Uprising‘s animations are really bad. While some mechanics or events have nice animations, the rest really manage to be overly irritating and turn people off from the game.
Since the gameplay dynamics in the game are already oversimplified, the bad animations create a huge gap. If the gameplay dynamics were not so easy, the negativity created by the animations could have been a little less obvious and could have had a structure that did not bore the player.
Optimization? What is that?
This type of productions are being developed by small studios, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Forza Horizon 5 It has become a new trend to require more system requirements than games like JETT: The Far Shore These exaggerated system requirements that I encountered with continue at full speed in Giants Uprising. No, since you asked for such exaggerated system requirements, at least give them in return. Even if you easily meet the recommended system requirements, you can never escape being drowned in endless optimization problems and face the wrath of 5 FPS.
Giants Uprising piles on problems as if to say, “Don’t play me.” Whether it’s the freezing/stuttering issues while destroying a house or the frame rate drops that occur when making sudden movements, the game is truly unplayable. As someone who experienced the game both when it first came out and after the latest major update, I can easily say that not much has changed. While many problems are said to have been fixed, the problems continue at full speed.
The Giants Uprising project, which really caught my attention despite knowing its structure would fall into infinite repetition, successfully managed to alienate me from the game with the endless negativities it piled on the player. While the successful storytelling shown when we first opened the game excited the cinematics, the first step I took into the game was equally disappointing.
Final Word
Giants Uprising was a game that I entered with low expectations and ended up with a huge disappointment. Although it has nice visuals and a successful storytelling, it manages to alienate the player from the game with its long loading times, serious optimization problems, simplistic gameplay dynamics, animation errors and endless replay loop.