Giga-Robo!

The other outsider of the month arrived straight from the planet of forgotten Kickstarters, carrying years of delays and all the bitterness that comes with them. It was the third of the games announced on the premise of “big manga robots smashing each other,” alongside AEGIS and GKR, and it ultimately did not disappoint me at all. It has plenty of customization, strong replayability, and, above all, the promise that the robots are not there to pose: they are there to brawl.

At its core, Giga-Robo! is a PvP arena game in which the building done before the fight carries real weight. The combinations of pilots, robots, and abilities are not merely cosmetic choices; they create a fair deckbuilding metagame, especially once you return to the game and start seeing which combinations you are pursuing and why. I found the rules depth somewhere between AEGIS and GKR: enough to give you things to explore, without losing the game’s central promise—namely, lots and lots of fighting.

Interaction is direct and depends greatly on the mode. On my first play, 1v1 did not seem especially meaningful to me, while 2v2 was where the game shone: with players who understand what they are doing and which combos they are aiming for, the team battle becomes genuinely interesting. Later, I also tried it as a three-way free-for-all, where the method for determining the winner proved very clever—especially for an arena game, a genre in which FFA is often the weak point.

The system has a little clunkiness, I will not hide that, but not enough to spoil the experience. On the contrary, the more you play it, the more it shows that it has flavour and room for you to develop through your choices. For me, Giga-Robo! is a successful little PvP monster: not the most elegant machine in the world, but deep enough, flexible enough, and full of the necessary robotic violence.

Updated session

The later session clearly improved my initial impression of the available modes. I did not change my mind that 2v2 is excellent when players know their combos, but the three-way FFA proved that the game holds up well elsewhere too, thanks to its clever winner determination. I would very much like to explore it further, but it is not especially quarantine-friendly.