A hundred-foot-tall power fantasy that still hasn't left Early Access after nearly five years, and it shows.
Official art · via Steam
Giants Uprising casts you as a hundred-foot-tall protagonist tearing through medieval armies and settlements, mixing destruction-based combat with environmental puzzles built around your own scale, wrapped around a buddy-dynamic story between two giants. VARSAV Game Studios put it into Early Access in November 2021, and nearly five years later, it's still there.
The opening hour delivers on the premise better than most games about being enormous manage to: charging through a line of soldiers and stomping a building flat carries a real, physical satisfaction. The destruction-themed environmental puzzles fit the identity well, the writing and voice acting land better than expected for the budget, and the central friendship between the two leads gives the story an actual anchor. The stonepunk art direction balances a snarky tone against a more sincere one without either side undercutting the game.
The combat underneath that opening hour doesn't hold up its end. Hit detection feels disconnected from what's on screen, one reviewer described the giant's own stomp attack as a weird, floaty mess that can't control its limbs all that well, and the deliberately slow movement meant to sell the character's size instead makes the whole game feel sluggish. Crashes and poor checkpointing force replaying entire sections, the campaign clocks in around two hours for most players, and giant-versus-giant fights stop being interesting after the first couple of encounters. Animations lack sharpness and the menus are clunky to navigate on top of all of it.
Steam holds Giants Uprising at a genuine Mixed rating in the high 50s (the store page and Steam's own review API disagree slightly on the exact count, 192 versus 254 reviews, but land in the same tier either way). No critic outlet has given it real coverage, Metacritic has no Metascore on file, and it has sat in Early Access for almost five years without a 1.0 release or the kind of endgame content that might have addressed how short it is.
Wait for a steep discount, if you buy it at all. The core fantasy has a real charge to it in the opening hour, but crashes, floaty combat, and a campaign barely long enough to fill a lunch break make the full price a hard sell five years into Early Access.