Gigantic launched in 2017 as a free-to-play team game from Motiga, published by Perfect World Entertainment on PC and Xbox One. It asked five players a side to protect a giant creature and kill the other team’s. A year later, the servers were shut down.
The design was better than the outcome.
Trailer, via Gigantic Official Game Channel.
Five Against Five, With a Monster on Each Side
Gigantic is a multiplayer online battle arena crossed with a third-person shooter. Two teams of five fight alongside a magical behemoth called a Guardian. Killing enemy players is not the point. Killing the enemy Guardian is.
Power drives everything. Teams collect power orbs from summoning circles, or earn them by killing opposing players and creatures. Reach 100 power and your Guardian enters a Rampage state, attacking the other Guardian and exposing its weak point. The defending team converts the power it gathered into a shield and holds the weak point. Kills and power events extend the attack window or add shield. Drain the health bar and you wound the Guardian. Three wounds wins the match.
That structure keeps a losing team alive. Power stops being offense and becomes defense at the exact moment it matters most.
Shooters, Brawlers and Spellcasters Share One Fight
Heroes fill familiar roles: shooter, melee fighter or spellcaster, with archetypes like Damage Dealers, Frontliners, Tanks, Support and Assassin underneath. Each character carries five skills, including a basic attack and a Focus ability that charges as you deal damage, heal others and so on.
The mix is the appeal. Melee combat, shooting mechanics and MOBA archetypes occupy the same match, and the roles have to cooperate rather than take turns. A Frontliner who never touches a summoning circle is a Frontliner who loses.
Players also summon creatures onto summoning circles to hold their side of the map and the neutral zones. The creatures help in different ways, stay where they spawned, and automatically collect power orbs in their area. That detail turns a brawl into a territory problem. Ignore the circles and you will lose a match you thought you were winning.
Movement Is the Whole Pitch
The original description called Gigantic a visually-stunning evolution in team action gaming, built on freedom of movement, play-style choice and towering Guardians. That holds up. The Guardians are the show, and the Rampage state gives every match a visible clock.
The game’s real identity is movement. Gigantic wants players climbing, dashing and repositioning constantly, and the third-person perspective makes the map feel like a space rather than a diagram. Compared with the top-down MOBAs it borrows from, that changes the math. You are not clicking a lane. You are watching a weak point and hoping your team remembers to defend it.
The cost is clarity. Five skills per Hero, five Heroes a side, creatures on circles, orbs to collect, a Guardian to feed and a shield to hold. New players will spend their first several matches unsure which of those things just killed them.
Abstraction Games Rebuilt It in 2024
Gigantic did not stay dead. Abstraction Games and Arc Games revived it as Gigantic: Rampage Edition in 2024, this time as a pay-to-play title. The rerelease came to Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and Series S.
That is a real second life, and a strange one. The original ran free and shut down within a year. The revival charges up front and runs on more platforms than the game ever did the first time.
Where the Design Holds and Where It Slips
The guardian system is the strongest thing here. Tying victory to three wounds rather than a single kill means a losing team can still hold a shield, still defend a weak point, still drag a match back. Few team games commit to that this hard.
The role spread is the second strength. Shooter, melee and spellcaster in one match forces a team to think about composition instead of stacking the same character five times. The Focus ability gives every Hero a resource that rewards doing the job rather than hiding from it.
The weaknesses are real. The learning curve is steep enough to shed players before the game explains itself. Five skills per Hero across a roster of roles is a lot to hold, and the third-person camera adds a dimension that MOBA habits do not prepare you for. Gigantic asks for commitment before it shows you why.
Then there is the business model. The 2017 release was free-to-play. The 2024 rerelease is not. A game that once asked for time now asks for money, and the version people can play today is not the version this score was built on.
The Verdict on Gigantic
Gigantic is a genuinely good team game that never got the run it deserved. The guardian loop is sharp, the role mix is generous, and map control through summoning circles gives it a strategic floor most shooters never build. It is also demanding in ways that cost it players, and its original free-to-play life ended after a single year.
The revival proves the design was worth saving. It does not prove the audience was ever there.
Gigantic by the Numbers
- Title: Gigantic
- Released: 2017
- Developer: Motiga
- Publisher: Perfect World Entertainment
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox One
- Genres: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Strategy
- Themes: Action, Fantasy
- Modes: Multiplayer, Co-operative
- Perspective: Third person
- Team size: 5v5
- Win condition: Wound the enemy Guardian 3 times
- Rampage threshold: 100 power
- Skills per Hero: 5
- Servers shut down: 2018
- Revival: Gigantic: Rampage Edition, 2024, pay-to-play, Abstraction Games and Arc Games, on Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X and Series S
- Critical score: 7.7/10 (IGDB critic aggregate, 6 outlets)
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