GigaBash is a cute and chaotic kaiju brawler that makes me miss arcades

News
By published

Beating up your friends is just more fun when you're a fuzzy monster.

If you, like me, watched Godzilla vs. Kong back in April and ended up thinking about how surprisingly fun the old Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters brawler was, you'll probably light up as soon as you see Gigabash, which debuted a new trailer at the PC Gaming Show on Sunday. Malaysian indie developer Passion Republic Games is making a four-player kaiju brawler with some appropriately over-the-top attacks and transformations (that's my way of saying that, one of the characters is a three-eyed snail). 

GigaBash's zoomed out, top-down camera is reminiscent of arena brawlers like Battlerite that were briefly very popular a few years ago, so I'm a little bummed it doesn't sell the immense scale of its fighters the way Destroy All Monsters did. But it also looks much more focused on slapstick, arcadey fun than esports the way Battlerite was—I'm thinking more Power Stone (RIP) or Smash Bros. For example: You can pick up whole buildings and chuck them at other monsters. And when you fill a super bar, your kaiju does get pretty damn big, standing about four times the size of the other puny building-height monsters.

The kaiju designs in Giga Bash are a lot of fun, too. I spy a knock-off Ultraman (who summons a gigantic freaking mech and a sword when he powers up) and the world's most spherical yeti, who I think would be a bit embarrassing to lose to.

In keeping with that arcadey feel it looks like GigaBash bucks the common kaiju trope of its monsters being slow, lumbering beasts—everyone on the screen looks fast and bouncy, a blessing amidst the chaos of a four-player free-for-all. The 3D art also looks pretty darn nice coming from an independent studio. It's detailed, but still cartoony enough to be easily readable.

GigaBash doesn't have a release date yet, but you can follow it in the community Discord or at the official site. 

Wes Fenlon
Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).