Gigantic: Rampage Edition

I've spent enough time in hero shooters to know when a game has a genuinely different heartbeat, and Gigantic: Rampage Edition has one. Where most of the genre asks you to hold angles and cycle abilities on a cooldown loop, this one drops you off an airship into a brawl that never really stops. There are no lanes, no gold, no creep waves. You fight over objectives, bank power for your team's giant Guardian, and when that meter hits 100 your Guardian pins the enemy's and your whole squad gets a timed window to burn it down. It is a strange loop, and it is legitimately fun once it clicks. The roster sits at 25 heroes split across ranged DPS, melee DPS, frontline, and support roles. The two additions new to this edition are Roland, a bounty hunter whose grapple-into-blunderbuss combo has a satisfying mechanical snap to it, and Kajir, a feline assassin built around illusions and burst. Both are functional picks, though balance across the full roster is uneven enough that you will notice a meta forming pretty quickly. Ability upgrades happen mid-match, and in the original Clash mode - locked until you hit level 10, which is a legitimate onboarding complaint - heroes start at level 1 and your whole team levels together. Rush, the new fast mode, throws everyone straight to level 10 with hero-swapping allowed between respawns and matches that can finish in under ten minutes. Rush is the better entry point; Clash is where the actual depth lives, especially with the pet system that lets you summon small creatures at waypoints to heal, block, or spot enemies. Here is where I have to be straight with you: the technical package is not where it needs to be for a competitive title in 2024. The frame rate is capped at 60 FPS out of the box, there is no native ping display, and launch week was rough with authentication failures and the occasional crash. A community workaround exists for the FPS cap involving config file edits, which is not something you should need to Google to play a shooter at your monitor's refresh rate. For anyone who cares about input latency and frame timing - and if you are used to 144hz or above, you will care - this is a friction point that Abstraction needs to address properly. The player population is the other honest concern. Steam reviews land at a mixed 66 percent positive from roughly 3,100 reviews, and the discourse around long-term survival has been consistent since launch. Cross-platform play with console players helps queue times, but the ceiling on ranked depth depends entirely on whether the game retains enough bodies to fill a healthy ladder. Ranked mode was not in at launch and was slated to follow in post-launch updates. Content volume is also thin relative to the ask - two new maps (Picaro Bay being the stronger of the pair) and two heroes is not a lot of rope for a revival pitch to hold onto. What saves it is that the core game is genuinely distinct. If you burned out on Overwatch's direction, never gelled with DOTA's pace, or just want a team shooter where every minute of a match has something happening, this scratches that itch in a way very few games do. The no-microtransactions-at-launch model means the roster is yours outright, which is refreshing when the competition charges per skin. Go in with a squad, accept that the population ceiling is real, and keep your expectations calibrated to a revival budget rather than a flagship launch. Fred, Scout Team