Gigapocalypse Early Access — Is it worth it?

Let’s be real. There aren’t enough games about Kaiju destroying cities. There are some, sure, but the genre is so ripe for games, yet doesn’t receive all that much love. Thankfully, Gigapocalypse has just entered Early Access to try and mitigate that a bit. The game can’t help but recall Rampage, but with much more replayability, adding in RPG elements and incremental mobile game-esque qualities. Despite only having four levels to stomp through currently, the game easily offers hours of play, even at this early state. But the question stands: is Gigapocalypse worth it already, or should you hold off for now?

Gigapocalypse has three Kaiju to choose from, each corresponding to easy, medium, and hard difficulties. Regardless of which Kaiju you pick, your monster starts off in a cell, held by a man named Captain Villain. This initial stage acts as a brief tutorial where you get to see your monster at full strength, before they’re greatly weakened by a time portal and sent away with only a fraction of that power remaining. What follows tasks you with upgrading your monsters back to tip-top shape by wreaking untold levels of havoc on the human populace.

The hub of the experience is a screen featuring a baby version of each Kaiju at the center. You can freely swap between any of the three via the options menu, although they don’t share anything. Each Kaiju starts out with only their most basic moves. The easiest monster comes with a claw attack and weak beam, but also has a lot of passive healing capabilities. The medium Kaiju’s default attack uses ice shards. The hard Kaiju just has a melee attack that also throws out exploding food items, although it does have little archers on its body that attack when you do.

Up in smoke

All three of them play quite differently and have a bunch of unique skills and upgrade paths. On the hub screen, you can pet your baby monster, clean up its waste, and upgrade its capabilities. At first, you can only head out into the first city, where you’ll get torn apart by soldiers fairly quickly. But destruction grants you points that you’ll use to upgrade a Kaiju’s characteristics. You’ll also fill a bar that grants a skill point every time you level up, alongside stat bonuses. Skill points are used to unlock and upgrade skills that operate on cooldown.

Gigapocalypse is an auto-scroll game. You can’t move your Kaiju, so it walks on its own, but you have complete control over its attacks. While this misses out on some of the visceral impact that you’d get from doing things more as Rampage does, it works perfectly well. Destroying locations is very enjoyable. The game is set to be in Early Access for only two months. By release, there will be two more levels and six more Kaiju. Considering its low $9.99 USD price tag and the amount of content already present, I’d say Gigapocalypse is absolutely worth it in Early Access if its premise appeals to you. And who doesn’t love laying waste to cities as a giant monster? That’s right, a much tinier monster.