Gigapocalypse (2021)

• Playtime: 77 minutes

• Played: 2026

• Context: I thought this looked potentially fun.

Intro

In Gigapocalypse you play a big Godzilla-like monster (kaiju) that walks from the left to the right, destroying buildings, vehicles and people. Between battles you can pet and feed this monster once. You get XP mostly from battles and a bit from care, which is spent on skills and upgrades.

Review

Having a big monster as a pet is a cute idea, and the setting is sort of amusing. That's about all the positives.

To give you an idea of how basic everything is: You can press a button to pet and a button to drop random food, but you can't even pet the monster directly or pick food. Combat mostly consists of aiming and shooting/clawing and pressing 1-5 for skills. But you start out without skills and slowly unlock them (i had only 2 skills after an hour) so it's rather boring. It doesn't help that you monster walks really slowly and there are weird parts where there are no enemies for 5+ seconds.

It gets worse. I died on my first run because you can actually run out of stamina and your basic attack requires it. You get stamina from destroyed buildings and later from one of your skills, and you can get upgrades to regeneration, but it takes a while. It's such a weird design. The balance in general is poor, you definitely have to replay maps 2-3 times to grind enough upgrades to proceed.

The final nail in the coffin are the boss fights. The first one is cute, requiring you to do simple math. The second has an annoying click-fast phase and a "try to dodge the mortar that you probably can't dodge" phase. The third one just one-shot me somehow. I quit after that.

TL;DR: It's a fun idea turned into a poorly made game.

FWIW, this game isn't awful but it's got some real limitations and bad balance issues that hold it back and comes with a very super casual design that give it a pretty low longevity for enjoyment. I guess you would call this an 'autobattler' (is that a genre?) that takes inspiration for 2D side-scrolling shooters with a kaiju theme. The other part of this game is like a weird mashup between a digital pet Tamagotchi and management/upgrade. Taking care of your kaiju pet in baby form is a bit silly and they just sort of tossed the idea in there to give you something to pick and poke at (feels like a tablet/mobile design concept, bleh) but they could have gone somewhere pretty neat with it. Your kaiju also gets 5 'pets' that are basically auto battling minions (a monster breeding mechanic here could have been interesting, but what they did with it almost feels like a gacha game design concept in how the Halloween keys work and what they do... basically get you a random pet.)

Begone, behemoth, the ley lines forbid thy mutant tread!

Don't get me wrong, the first half hour of this were a dopamine blast of everything on the screen blowing up to my apocalyptic Gigadeath satisfaction. The problem with this game is that after 30 minutes that it will take you to upgrade your kaiju enough to stomp your way to the end of the first city, you've pretty much seen it all and done everything that there is to really do that's worth doing. (I dont think the maps are even random it's just doing the same thing over and over again) The rest of the game suffers because it's just more-of-the-same.... There are other levels with different themes that up the difficulty but they are just SILLY... (Not to mention that they are maybe ALL the same enemies just with asset-flip sprites) The game is such that once you get going you can easily upgrade your beastie in a near parabolic fashion... True, there are other monsters, and some do have different playstyles but after trying a few it was essentially more-of-the-same as well because at core, this is essentially an autobattler where most of the damage is automatically dealt and dished out.

This isn't Rampage, but it is reminiscent and does manage to capture the feel. there is tons of stuff to shoot at on screen and attack, it's just a shame this is a nuts-and-bolts mobile-based autobattler with some mechanics that aren't far off from gacha design concepts.