Gigantic

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At its core, Gigantic is a five-on-five class-based arena shooter. You pick a character with a unique skill-set, and work together with your teammates to destroy the opposing team’s guardian while protecting your own, kind of like capture the flag, only the flag is a three-story-high dragon that stomps around the map breathing fire. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a MOBA, or an RPG or any other genre either. They aren’t completely wrong mind you, but the arena shooter skill-set is what matters here, not how sick of a jungler or min-maxer you are.That said, winning isn’t strictly about how fast your reflexes are, or how sharp your aim is (though both certainly help). Gigantic is heavily objective-based, and the shifting nature of said objectives means that team fights break out often, and in a lot of different places. One second you’re defending your guardian from an attack, then your shooting out to retake a lost control point, only to have the opposing guardian go on a rampage, forcing you to flee into tighter corridors at the edges of the map where fights can be brutal and decisive. Choosing which objective to play, and whether to attack or defend provides a regular stream of interesting choices to make.As you level up throughout a match, that same interesting decision-making occurs as you allocate skill points to upgrade your five abilities, all of which you have access to base version of right at the start. These aren’t boring straight-line upgrades either; they actually change skills in meaningful ways. In the two matches I played with a support character named Vodan, I wound up with two completely different characters, one who was able to rapidly heal my allies and get them out of bad engagements, and another who could confound my foes with copies of himself while poisoning them from afar.There’s more too, plenty more: a wide variety of characters and team compositions to experiment with, which monsters to bring to the battle, and which ones to summon at which capture point, passive ability slots...there’s a lot to unpack. Until you do, the fast pace of the action, and familiar controls are enough, but now that I’ve started to stumble down the rabbit hole, I’m not sure when I’m coming up.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and argue with everything he says about them.