Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Giants: Citizen Kabuto (hereafter called Giants) is a third-person shooter video game with real-time strategy elements. It was the first project for Planet Moon Studios, who went on to make Armed and Dangerous and the Wii rhythm-action game Battle of the Bands.
The cast features a group of quirky heroes and villains including:
- The Meccaryns: high-tech, cockney, spaced-out space men.
- Sea Reapers: A race of mostly blue skinned humanoid magic users.
- Kabuto: a massive protector of the Sea Reapers who turned against them.
- Smarties: the put-upon locals who provide most of the comic relief in the game and later serve as base builders in the RTS sections
Tropes used in Giants: Citizen Kabuto include:
- Big No: the death of Timmy
- The Dumbledore: Yan. He might just be incompetent/insane though.
- Everything Fades: Or in this case, gets eaten. A horde of small insects crawls from underground and eats the whole corpse in seconds.
- Healing Factor: Delphi regenerates in water.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Baz can only carry three weapons, but one (the mortar launcher) of those can be nearly as big as him.
- Game Breaking Bug: Made all the more annoying by the lack of a save feature. Many of these where fixed in later versions.
- Interspecies Romance: Delphi and Baz
- Also Reggie and Timmy's Mum.
- Kaiju: Kabuto. Enormous, insanely powerful... And he grows even bigger and even more insanely powerful the more it eats.
- Mobile Shrubbery
- Mook Maker: One of Kabuto's abilities when he's big enough.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Delphi is quite a foil to Sappho in both personality and appearance. The Sea Reapermen are shown to be hostile jerks for the most part and frequent in-game Mooks, but seeing as one of them serves one of the Meccs a few drinks at a bar without much fuss, they may just be following Sappho's orders.
- Not Quite Flight/Super Speed - The Sea Reapers' turbo ability.
- I Am Your Father Parodied with Delphi and Yan
- Spiritual Successor: To Sacrifice, and spiritually succeeded by Brutal Legend.
- Surrounded by Idiots: Baz and later Delphi
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: From a TPS to an RPS to a racing game to a giant monster simulator.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Think about it. One of the three playable factions involves a giant monster (hence the title) who increases in abilities by eating resources... and OTHER UNITS! Yes, even the ones which are human-controlled!
- X Meets Y: One Amazon reviewer described it as Tribes meets Wave Race meets Red Alert meets Rampage.
- It could be safely described as First-Person Shooter meets Real Time Strategy-lite, topped off with Planet Moon Studios' signature humor.