Some people don’t get the full picture of games journalism, especially when it comes to reviewing. Our job is not only to ascertain the quality of a title and all its component parts. It also involves highlighting the entire game experience and what effect it has on the player. For example, when some games have overly intrusive DRM to the point that it interferes with the game experience, then that makes up part of the evaluation, because it makes up part of the game experience.
Gigantic Army has a somewhat unique foible to add to most players’ game experience. How often do you read the entire game manual of a digitally downloaded game? For most of us the answer would probably be rarely or never. Upon starting GA for the first time, it is a little odd to note that none of the intro credits appear to be skippable. Hammering away at Enter, Esc and Spacebar yield no results. So having waited through an interminable intro detailing the generic storyline via white text on a black background, and the usual introductory mini movies, you are finally ditched in the main menu.
First stop of course is to check the options. There is no mouse support, so you use cursor keys to choose options on the main menu and press Enter. Nothing happens. Spacebar. Nothing. Ctrl, Alt, Numpad Enter, Insert, Tab, CapsLock. Nothing. All number keys. Nothing. Mash entire keyboard frantically trying to find any button that will do something. Then when you hit the Esc key, the whole game will quit. After your first two attempts to run the game have met with the same success as a concrete parachute, some will have given up on this little indie title and moved onto something else.
Only when forcing yourself to wade through the manual do you notice that the attack key Z, also doubles to mean ‘accept’. Could that possibly mean for the menus? Indeed it does. How silly of me. I can’t believe I didn’t try Z at the beginning. Why would I be so presumptuous as to assume that GA would follow the path of 99% of other games and use that big shiny obvious Enter button to navigate menus. And who needs mouse support anyway? There were no mice on the old arcade machines, so that just means we’re retro right?
In fact, why not make the whole game retro like an arcade game? All these modern games with their flashy new savegames and level select features just don’t get it. Unless you complete a game in one sitting you are not a real man (or woman – Gender Equality Ed). It’s not like you are going to have something occur in your life that would make you stop playing and render your entire game time thus far redundant. When you start every game don’t you have an unlimited amount of time to spend playing, even if you have absolutely no idea how long the game is?
But just imagine the cataclysmic scenario where you did need to briefly pause the game for something as extreme as, let’s say, the phone ringing, or someone knocking at the door. Naturally you’d probably want to ignore those pesky distractions, but in the event that it might be the president of the United States, or the pizza boy, you may need to pause the game. Easy enough surely? Let’s press P. Nothing. Esc. Nothing. Spacebar. Dammit, that just wasted my superweapon into a wall. Where the hell is the pause key? Well, if you’d memorised the manual properly you’d know that it is the Q key. Joy!
Not that you’d have reason to need to access the game menu whilst playing the game (for instance to check out what key is Pause, but you already knew that from reading the manual right?), but if you do need to check the menu, then the key is the sensibly assigned R key. However, the cost of accessing the menu mid-game means that your entire game progress is erased, and you must start again from the very beginning when you wish to continue playing.
You may ask yourself why the last 4 paragraphs have been dealing with asinine key allocation and lack of ability to save progress. As explained at the beginning, these are all part of your game experience. Whilst it is possible that you did read and memorise the manual, and just did happen to have plenty of time to spend playing a game of indeterminate length, that is quite simply not going to happen for most people. You are likely going to fall at every hurdle, and have your playtime ruined multiple times by the sheer stupidity of the way the game is set up.
Those grinding issues aside, the actual game itself is pretty good. There are 6 missions through which you guide a robotic avatar through levels crammed to bursting with things that want to shoot you. From turrets to tanks, to freaking enormous flying hunks of metallic badness that rain down fiery, lasery, explodey death upon you in a constant stream. Your dextrous leaping and dodging whilst returning fire is the only way to survive. Oh, and the whole thing is timed, so don’t dawdle or you’ll get a Game Over without even dying.
You get a choice of 3 primary weapons and 3 special weapons, each with a different way of firing, and requiring different playing techniques. Although it must be said that the riot gun does make things quite simple as it has such a wide spread and fast rate of fire that you can stop almost any rocket headed in your direction without even aiming. That’s quite fortunate because aiming is a task suited to a mouse or a gamepad. Since there is no mouse, you get keyboard or gamepad. And the gamepad does not function in the way you would expect, with the weapon simply being raised or lowered, and then locking in position whenever you start shooting. This means it does not follow the literal direction you are pointing for much of the time. So there is little benefit in using the gamepad over the keyboard. Retro indeed.
Gigantic Army sadly cannot earn the merit of being recommended. It is fun to play through a few times, but offers nothing new or particularly interesting. It sits alongside a veritable slew of similar titles that provide a similar experience, and does very little to differentiate itself from the pack, aside from the uniquely nonsensical control allocations. Consider it a pleasant diversion if you find it on sale or in an indie bundle somewhere.
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