On the shoulders of unbalanced giants
There isn’t anything fundamentally broken with Shoulders of Giants, and for such a small team to put this out is a miracle in and of itself, but when compared to other games like it it’s an uphill battle.
Shoulders of Giants is a third-person rogue-lite where we (or a group of 4 of us) need to stave off premature destruction of the universe. We play as an alien frog, of course named Froggie, who sits atop a sentient robot named GERM. We are also aided by a gun-toting baboon, a telescope using chameleon, a cyborg blacksmith panda (who lost an eye because his self feeding bamboo machine malfunctioned) and the group leader, the wise old owl. It was this cast of characters and their humorous dialogue, as well as the vibrant colors, that made the initial hours of this game so charming and easy to get through.
The entire loop of the game is focused on being sent to planets to cure them of a force known as Entropy. Every planetary mission that we are able to pick from has 2-4 levels, with three random modes to encounter. The first is Conquest, which charges the player with destroying three Entropy Spires before destroying a large one, surrounded by enemies. This can grow boring quickly because it devolves into running past every single enemy until we find a spire. The second mode is Storm, which simply requires us to get to the end of the level’s spire but with the added nuisance of not being able to see more than ten to twenty feet. This level type could last as little as under a minute or as long as 30 minutes depending on luck. We always dread playing it. Bugcatcher was the last mode we experienced; the objective being to kill a set number of marked enemies. It’s simple, balanced and bland. The last level’s spire is always a boss, of which there are several of the same exact types, such as giant spider or a troll with a club. It wasn’t uncommon to see the same boss appear twice in a row.
Each successful run will fuel our HEAT gauge a certain amount, but if we fail we lose that same amount of HEAT. We are never really able to accurately gauge the challenge to come. The difficulty number is irrelevant if we get cheap enemies, especially en masse. This proves to be particularly true in the final act of the game, when the worst types of enemies are appearing.
Before heading out on a mission we can talk to one of our animal friends to upgrade our skill tree or change our loadout. Talking to Panda will let us equip or craft a GERM Core, which determines what equipped abilities we start with at the beginning of a level. Each Core has six ability slots, three robot based and three frog based, being melee and ranged respectively. Talking to Baboon gives us the option to change what weapons Froggie and GERM will be equipped with. Then there is Owl who increases our skills, but we found that the first half of the skill tree is inessential to survival; only the the second half really matters. Finally, Dr. Chameleon and his trusty telescope sends us on our missions.
It’s really hard to say if singleplayer or multiplayer is the better version of this game, which is the main reason it doesn’t work. I started playing this game by myself but was starting to run into some difficulty. This is reinforced by bad hit-detection with melee and a wonky camera. I asked a friend to play multiplayer with me for the remainder of the game because playing alone doesn’t feel optimal with these issues.
This is when it falls apart. Shoulders of Giants wants us to play together, but they scale up the challenge in numerous ways while at the same time taking away our tools to success. Pinging a player is useless unless we are staring right at the person doing it. I am more offended by how they turn cooperative multiplayer into a free-for-all. There are shrines to grab, abilities to equip, but the only thing instanced to every player is the XP. It’s too easy to go through a level without obtaining any abilities for a hard fight. Finally, because of the way difficulty is balanced, the last five hours of the game feel like playing tug-of-war that finally results in a good drop that makes it possible to finish. We were already asking ourselves do we really want to keep pulling this rope?
I see what Moving Pieces Interactive is going for with this game. It has vibrant and distinct visuals to set it apart in a formula we know and love, but it doesn’t promote the best aspects of the genre: teamwork. And with poor balancing issues it could never reach its true potential.
This game is based on a PC review code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. All images courtesy
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