GigaBash Review (PS5) – Few things have personally given me more pleasure than the resurgence of great monsters scrapping it.

So when the GigaBash reveal trailer showed up a while back, I was understandably excited.

In short? It’s a four-player brawl where a quartet of hulking beasts (and machines) smash seven shades apart and perform earth-shattering smackdowns on the rubble of a populated city.

GigaBash Review (PS5) – A delightfully silly multiplayer Brawler that captures the hearts of a bygone era of monster movies

Getting the important things right

Played in semi-isometric arenas, GigaBash is a radioactive fusion of the classic monster fighter War of the Monsters, Power Stone and Smash Bros.

Some influences are, of course, more palpable than others, and on the face of it, GigaBash owes a lot to the PlayStation 2 era fighter published by Capcom.

It’s big, flashy and cartoonish, with its violence, and all-in for destructive entertainment with brains checked at the door.

All the action and no metaphor might be the problem with a lot of modern Godzilla and Kong adaptations, but it’s much less of an issue for a video game where the damn stuff is just about the point.

The main thing that GigaBash captures is the ridiculousness of the monster movie genre in its golden age.

There’s a story mode that gives each titanic fighter their own backstory, and they all have the endearing goofy charm of the kajiu-focused movies from the 60s and 70s.

It’s not surprising, but it serves to make each creature feel important on its own.

Every monster is special

The sense of awe for what they are and what they can do is beautifully conveyed and adds a bit of flavor to choosing your giant fighter.

That’s especially useful because it makes the silly-looking monsters just as dignified as the cool-looking monsters when you’re forced to learn more about what they’re doing.

That puffball of a Yeti Gigabash on the roster may look silly, but his rolling snowball attack makes him a bloody badass in any fight.

Combat is very arcade oriented. A few buttons do a lot, with alt gestures usually coming from context changes like jumping before attacking or holding down the attack button.

As such, GigaBash is remarkably easy to mess around with, but still has a dash of tactical depth to it.

smash!!

The aforementioned story mode also acts as a welcome tutorial of sorts (there’s also a standard tutorial if you want things to be explained in a short amount of time), confronting you with progressively greater challenges, all the while getting comfortable with the roster .

It’s also a satisfyingly brisk exercise set. It doesn’t matter if you tear up trees to turn a Voltron knock-off into a home run ball, slam armored lizards against a wall of wooden spikes, or just drive a Yeti into an office building.

GigaBash just understands that the merry nature of causing chaos on a city-wide level is a wonderful attraction.

By defeating enemies and picking up glowing orbs scattered everywhere, monsters can be charged into even bigger forms for a period of time, usually causing all those who are now smaller than you to flee in fear.

Online Smashing

While the story mode gives at least some reason for solo flyers to try out GigaBash, the point is definitely in the madness of multiplayer.

In reality, that’s where this game will live or die in modern times, as the chances of four people in the same room fighting it out isn’t as great as it used to be.

Online games rely heavily on a constant, continuous number of players, which even the best multiplayer games can struggle with.

I’m already a bit concerned about the online side of things as I’ve struggled to get a game with more than one human on multiple occasions.

Luckily I have kids and extra controllers so I was able to really test how accessible GigaBash is.

It’s basically a lot of fun. While there is an element of skill to getting it right, this is a fighter first and then a fighter.

It’s a game that consistently rewards the thunderous clash of titans as they decimate cities to settle unspoken beef.

I always find that the mark of a good family multiplayer game is one that has the kids giggling with every move they perform, and let me tell you GigaBash got quite a few chuckles.

It’s GigaBash time

There is no big surprise for GigaBash. It plays almost exactly as I hoped it would, and has a really nice roster of big gits to blow up and get beaten through.

That does mean that it only satisfies if it could have been better to exceed expectations.

Still, I think back to the 2014 Godzilla game which was terrible by nature, but I fell in love with it because there was just nothing comparable at the time, and I kind of missed that.

GigaBash may not have that license and the history it brought to the table, but it certainly captures the essence of that franchise’s Showa and Hesei eras.

Think of it as the Gamera of Kaiju brawlers. It’s definitely an imitation of something more famous, but it still manages to perform the same moves…sometimes even better than the original.

GigaBash is now available on PS5 and PS4.

Review code kindly provided by publisher.