If Valorant represents the hero shooter at one extreme, Gigantic sits at the other: it is primarily a MOBA with shooter elements, more in a line with a traditional League of Legends or DoTA 2 experience than anything like Overwatch, Paladins or Apex Legends. Because of the massive burst damage and CC potential of the melee units, you get that tight negotation of space so emblematic of traditional MOBAs: players engaging in passive stare downs, waiting for the slightest perceptible opening to pounce. A high stakes game of chicken where there is just a hairs breadth between "overextending" into certain death or confirming a kill. In contrast, the ranged characters play and feel like your more traditional hero shooter fare, but the power that would come with so much map control has been heavily nerfed to compensate. Primary fire damage is low, time to kill is obscenely high, and everything revolves around disengagement and cooldowns. There's no creeps to farm, but the movement and mechanics are undoubtedly MOBA.

But these concepts don't translate as well as they probably should. I noted it in this game's Korean cousin, Storm Strikers, as well; this game's readability is complete trash. The time to kill being so high, you just get a crowd of characters wailing on eachother, spamming cooldowns with very little thought. Bright colors flash all over the screen, giant AOES of no discernible origin cover the ground, and giant white letters pop up to say "FROZEN. ARMOR BROKEN. SLOWED. POISONED. VOID GRIPPED." It's just graphical vomit, the kind people will tell you "Don't worry bro, it all makes sense after 1000 hours bro, I swear bro." Be that as it may, the problem with these games is player retention, and it doesn't have the benefit of the older MOBAs long-running communities to fall back on. New players are not going to know what is killing them, how fast and why. It might be novel while everyone plays with the new toy; but as the playerbase wanes and the skill gap widens this is going to be a problem. Just ask Storm Strikers with its 10 daily players.

As a long time player of these titles, I know good concepts when I see them, and Gigantic has some really strong points in its favor. The game has great pacing in the current "Rush" mode and I feel like it rewards both game sense and high mechanical skill equitably. I can see why this game had a diehard community, and it's satisfying to see these players get their game back in the era of GaaS. Many of my favorite MOBAs and hero shooters are gone for good, casualties of a mix of bad marketing and corporate greed. I never even got to play Gigantic before it got hit with the end of service announcement. Now that I've finally played it, I can see both why its loved and why it was canned.

Games like this need to focus on player retention, especially if they are paid titles. So the developers undoubtedly have their work cut out for them. Framerate optimization, server stability and UI fixes stand out as the most important pain points; but the new user onboarding has to also be drastically improved. Then it is a matter of making sure those players stay onboard- and the answer is never a battle pass or balance patches. What we need to see out of Gigantic is alternate ways to play the game- as these sorts of options are appeal to casual userbases. Different gamemodes are an important part of the hero shooter ecosystem because they allow for healthier player seperation. Let the tryhards dominate modes with more competitive depth, but give the normal players a low-stakes gamemode where they can just relax and turn their brains off.

As it is, Gigantic feels doomed to fail, but all hope is not lost if the developers have been paying as close attention to the industry as the players have.