Gigantic: Rampage Edition is a slightly shaky but mostly thrilling revival of my favorite dead game

GamesMOBAGigantic: Rampage EditionGigantic: Rampage Edition is a slightly shaky but mostly thrilling revival of my favorite dead gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Gigantic: Rampage Edition

Six years ago, the Gigantic subreddit pinned a mod post titled “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Only a year after release, the MOBA/hero-shooter hybrid shuttered its servers after fighting tooth and nail toeven releasein the first place. Much like contemporaries Battleborn and Paragon, Gigantic pulled together a small, enthusiastic community, but nothing that could match the roaring success of Overwatch a year earlier.

As a fan of Gigantic before its death I was elated when last year’smysterious private playtestseemed to imply a revival was in the works, and even more elated to learn that it actually was. Gigantic is one of the few live service games to rise from the grave with Rampage Edition, now with a new studio and Arc Games (formerly Gearbox Publishing) behind the wheel. But if Gigantic was too late to the party to stay afloat the first time around, why would things be different half a decade later?

Well, that small community was so enthusiastic for a reason. As MOBAs and hero shooters go, Gigantic is unique. It’s less about galaxy-brain tactics and more about constant brawling for resources. There are no lanes, towers, creeps, or capture points. There’s no gold farming. In fact, there’s hardly any downtime at all: as soon as a match starts you blast onto the map from an airship and start looking for team fights.

This is taken to an extreme in the headline mode new to this revival, Rush, which is the only one available until you’ve gotten a few games in. Rush discards a number of mechanics from the Gigantic of old—now called Clash—to get you in and out in record time. My shortest Rush match was an anarchic 4 minutes of nonstop pushes and multikills. It was exhilarating, though so chaotic that almost all coherence was lost.

While a lot of the depth and breadth of the game’s original mode is missing in Rush (and I dropped it once I could play Gigantic as I remembered it), the popularity of ARAM and Turbo modes in League of Legends and DOTA 2 show that there’s a lot of enthusiasm for leaner experiences in the MOBA genre. And that same philosophy is why I think Gigantic has a chance in 2024—even Clash is refreshingly lean action in the midst of all those meta-heavy shooters.

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Gigantic: Rampage Edition also has revamped tutorials, new maps, and two new heroes: Sickle-wielding illusionist snake/cat/guy Kajir, and grizzled bounty hunter Roland, whose satisfying grappling hook-into-shotgun blast combo has locked him in as one of my favorites. I remember concept art for Kajir floating around before Gigantic’s servers were shut down, so it’s like walking into an alternate universe where the party never stopped.

The only thing harshing my mellow in Gigantic: Rampage Edition so far: bug after crash after failed queue. The launch has been rocky, to say the least, with players unable to successfully find matches for hours at a time. It’s the usual launch day stuff—and is probably because they broke their all-time player count recordwithin a day—but it’s continued intermittently for days now, with a mysterious line of text proclaiming ‘PATHS NEED TO BE REBUILT’ on the menu screen. I’ve also experienced graphical glitches, with Guardian animations failing spectacularly, queue wait timers displaying when I’ve not queued for anything, and end-of-match screens not loading at all. Once I get into matches nothing actually stops me from playing aside from the occasional lag spike, but all the instability indicates a lack of polish that I don’t remember haunting the original game.

The revival team at Abstraction Games seems to be hard at work rolling out regular fixes, and they promised players a compensation package once all those paths in need of rebuilding are sorted out, so hopefully this is all over soon.

Image1of5(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Image1of5

(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Gigantic: Rampage Edition

(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Gigantic: Rampage Edition

(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Gigantic: Rampage Edition

(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Gigantic: Rampage Edition

(Image credit: Abstraction Games)

Gigantic: Rampage Edition

All that said, it’s vastly preferable to the glut of battle passes, rotating limited-time purchases, pricey skin bundles and so on I’m met with whenever I open Fortnite or Valorant. It’s a nice change of pace to see a (kind of) new competitive multiplayer game not nickel-and-diming players for all they’re worth.

So, how about Battleborn next?

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