Giants Citizen Kabuto

Interplay £29.99 PC CD-ROM Out Now

System requirements
Windows 95/98/98SE/ME
Pentium 2 266MHz (Pentium 3 or Athlon recommended)
64MB of RAM (128MB recommended)
500MB Hard Drive Space (700MB recommended)
8MB Direct3D graphics card (32MB recommended with hardware T&L)

I'm sure by now most of you will have come across the game Giants Citizen Kabuto and know how most games magazines have rated it very highly. You may have even played the one of three demos that are available. However, unless you've played the full game you won't appreciate the amount of variety that exists within this action packed game from Interplay.

Giants sees you controlling one of three races. These are the Meccs, Delphi the Sea Reaper and the Kabuto (the Giant). All three have slightly different controls and styles of gameplay involved with them. Giants is sort of an action game with a small sprinkling of strategy elements in a few levels that require you to build bases and so forth. The control of the characters is almost like a shoot-em up (W,A,S,D, are the direction keys and the mouse is used to fire and look around). The graphics are fantastic and you will certainly benefit from having a transform and lighting (T&L) capable graphics card such as the ATI Radeon or one of the Nvidia Geforce range.

It says on the box that you have a choice of who to play. This isn't strictly true as the nature of the game's story dictates who you control. The game first lets you play as the Meccs and then as Delphi the Sea Reaper and finally as the Giant Kabuto. The Meccs are five Meccaryns who are on the way to a holiday resort called Planet Majorca and provide the game with its 'British' sense of humour. As well as these characters that you can control there are the Smarties who are the natives of the planet. They are instrumental in the unfolding of the story and are used when building bases.

Click the thumbnails for the big picture.

The missions in the game have a great amount of variety and although some are a bit tedious it is nice to find a difference across the range of missions. The game does have its problems and the biggest one that annoyed me was that like Oni it contains no way of saving the game whilst in a mission. It is frustrating when you get killed towards the end of a mission only to have to start again. This is made worse by the fact that there is no way you can alter the difficulty of the game. Some of the levels are difficult and it is very annoying if you are back to square one after a silly mistake. Although the single player game is quite long, once you've finished there will be no replay value either. There is no single player skirmish mode and unless you want to play across the Internet, where stability is suspect, the game will not have anything to make you go back to it.

Everything in the game is subtitled and deaf gamers everywhere will appreciate the interesting story that Giants provides. The disappointment with Giants is that the aforementioned problems will deter many people from playing or indeed buying the game. This is a shame as it truly is a beautifully looking and highly original game.

Overall Game Rating: 8/10 Flawed but highly original and very accessible to deaf gamers.

Quality of text: 10/10 Spot on. Very clear subtitles and they're on by default.

Graphics: 9/10 The graphics are very good.

Interface: 7/10 A nice and simple interface for all of the 3 races.

Gameplay:6/10 This should have been excellent but the lack of mid-level saves and no difficulty choice make it hard to justify a better mark.