GIGABASH REVIEW: THE BEST MODERN KAIJU BRAWLER?

The first time I went S-Class in GigaBash, I didn't know it was coming. I'd been mashing through a match as Gorogong, this big stone golem guy, absorbing energy orbs without really understanding what they were building toward. Then the screen flashed, the camera pulled way back, and suddenly my character was the size of a skyscraper. Every other monster on the field looked like a toy. I slammed the ground and buildings disintegrated in a circle around me. My friend on the couch said something unrepeatable and started running his little mantis creature in the opposite direction. That moment, right there, is GigaBash at its best. Pure spectacle, genuine surprise, and the kind of shared reaction that only happens when people are in the same room.

GigaBash is a four-player kaiju arena brawler developed by Passion Republic Games, a Malaysian studio. It came out in 2022 and has been steadily updated since, adding DLC characters from the Godzilla and Ultraman franchises. The pitch is simple: pick a giant monster, drop into a destructible city, and fight. If you've ever played War of the Monsters on PS2 or Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee on GameCube, you know the template. GigaBash is the modern version of that idea, and for the most part, it's the best one we've gotten.

The roster

The character lineup is one of GigaBash's real strengths. The base roster is entirely original monsters, and the designs are excellent. You've got Gorogong, the stone titan. Woolley, a massive mammoth that plays like a grappler. Skorak, a scorpion creature with range attacks. Pipijuras, who is basically Godzilla with the serial numbers filed off. Each one feels distinct to play, and the visual designs are varied enough that four-player matches stay readable even when the screen gets chaotic.

What I appreciate about the original roster is that it doesn't rely on any single kaiju tradition. Some monsters feel like they walked out of a tokusatsu show. Others lean more Pacific Rim. A few are just weird in a way that doesn't reference anything specific, and those tend to be the most fun. Rawa is a plant-based kaiju that controls space in ways the other characters can't. Mecha-Rawa is the obligatory robot mirror match. There's enough variety that you don't feel like you're picking from a lineup of slightly different lizards.

The DLC is where the licensed characters come in. Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, Ultraman, and a handful of others have been added over time. These are fan service done right. Godzilla's atomic breath feels appropriately devastating. Ultraman's moveset pulls from the show in ways that fans will immediately recognize. The licensed characters are mechanically interesting on their own, not just skins over existing move sets. Each one was clearly designed from scratch to fit the game's systems while respecting the source material.

The roster sits at around 15 characters total with DLC included. That's not huge by fighting game standards, but for a kaiju brawler, where every character needs to feel massive and unique, it's a solid number. I'd rather have 15 monsters that all play differently than 30 that blur together.

Combat

Here's where I need to be honest about what GigaBash is and isn't. The combat is fun. It is not deep. If you're coming from traditional fighting games and expecting frame data, intricate combo routes, and a high skill ceiling, you're going to bounce off this pretty quickly. GigaBash is a party brawler first. Light attack, heavy attack, special, grab. There are combos, but they're short and intuitive rather than technical. The game wants you to pick it up and start smashing within thirty seconds.

That said, there's more going on under the surface than the first few matches suggest. Positioning matters a lot. Each character has different ranges and approach angles, and knowing when to engage and when to back off creates real decision-making in competitive matches. Some monsters dominate at close range. Others want to control space with projectiles and area denial. The arenas have elevation changes and environmental hazards that reward spatial awareness. A player who understands their character's strengths and the map layout will consistently beat a button masher, which is the minimum bar a fighting game needs to clear, and GigaBash clears it.

The grab system is the secret weapon of the combat. You can grab other players, sure, but you can also grab pieces of the environment. Radio towers, cars, chunks of buildings. Rip a streetlight out of the ground and swing it. Pick up a tank and throw it at someone's face. This environmental interaction is what separates GigaBash from a generic arena fighter. Fights don't happen in front of the city. They happen through it. By the end of a match, the arena is a flattened ruin, and getting there was half the fun.

My complaint with the combat is that it can feel floaty. Hits don't always have the weight they should. When you're a 300-foot monster slamming another 300-foot monster into a building, you want that impact to feel bone-rattling. GigaBash gets this right sometimes, particularly with the heavier characters and during S-Class mode, but the lighter characters can feel like they're skating on ice. There's a slight disconnect between the visual spectacle and the tactile feedback, and it prevents the combat from being truly great.

S-Class

The S-Class transformation is the mechanic that defines GigaBash and separates it from everything else in the genre. During a match, energy orbs spawn around the arena. Collect enough and you can trigger S-Class mode, which transforms your monster into a massive, powered-up version of itself. You grow to roughly twice your normal size. Your attacks gain new properties. You become a walking catastrophe.

What makes S-Class work isn't just the power spike. It's the dynamics it creates in multiplayer. When one player goes S-Class, the match fundamentally changes. The other three players have to decide: do we team up against the giant, or do we scatter and try to outlast the timer? That temporary alliance-building happens naturally, without any game system forcing it. I've seen matches where two rivals immediately stopped fighting each other and started coordinating against the S-Class player, only to turn on each other the instant the transformation wore off. That's emergent social gameplay, and it happens because the mechanic is designed to create exactly those moments.

The S-Class transformations are visually spectacular too. Each character has a unique S-Class form with its own visual flair and signature move. Some of them are genuinely jaw-dropping the first time you see them. Pipijuras goes full nuclear. Woolley becomes a glacial titan. The presentation sells the power fantasy completely. You feel like the final boss of your own kaiju movie.

If there's a criticism, it's that S-Class can feel a bit win-more. The player who's already doing well in a match is often the one collecting the most energy orbs, which means the player in the lead gets the biggest power boost. There are catch-up mechanics, damaged players drop more energy orbs and pickups spawn in contested areas, but in practice, the momentum advantage can snowball. In four-player free-for-all this matters less because politics naturally check the leader. In one-on-one matches, it can feel rough.

Destruction

The environmental destruction is one of GigaBash's biggest selling points, and it mostly delivers. Buildings crumble. Roads crack. Bridges collapse. The physics are satisfying and the visual payoff of watching a city disintegrate around a four-way monster brawl is exactly what you want from this genre. Certain arenas have set-piece destruction events, a dam breaking, a volcano erupting, that add a layer of environmental chaos to matches.

I keep coming back to the comparison with War of the Monsters, because that PS2 game from 2003 set a bar for environmental interaction in kaiju brawlers that very few games have matched since. GigaBash comes closer than anything else. The arenas feel like real spaces being destroyed rather than static backdrops with breakable props. There's a weight to the destruction that sells the scale. When Gorogong body-slams through a skyscraper, the building doesn't just pop out of existence. It crumbles, debris falls, dust clouds billow. The aftermath lingers in the arena, changing the terrain for the rest of the match.

Where GigaBash falls short of War of the Monsters is in how much agency you have over the destruction. War of the Monsters let you use the environment as a weapon in incredibly specific ways. Impale an opponent on a radio antenna. Throw them into a gas station and watch it explode. Slam them through a specific building to trigger a specific collapse. GigaBash's destruction is broader but less precise. You can pick up objects and throw them, but the environmental interaction is more general purpose. Smash things, throw things, don't think too hard about which things. It works great in the moment, but it lacks the tactical specificity that War of the Monsters had.

Single-player

GigaBash has a story mode. I should tell you about it because it exists, but I'm not going to pretend it's the reason to play. Each original monster has a short campaign with cutscenes, and the writing and presentation are charming enough. The campaigns serve as tutorials for each character's moveset while telling simple origin stories. Some of them are genuinely fun. Gorogong's campaign has a nice emotional beat. The Ultraman DLC campaign is solid fan service.

But the AI is not great. Fighting game AI is hard to get right, and GigaBash's bots oscillate between braindead and frustratingly cheap. There's a middle difficulty that works okay for learning, but the AI never provides the kind of challenge that makes single-player competitive fighting feel rewarding. This is a multiplayer game. The single-player content is a bonus, not a pillar.

There's also a roguelite mode that was added post-launch, which is a nice idea. You pick a monster, fight through a series of encounters with modifiers and upgrades between rounds. It adds some replayability for solo players and it's clear the developers were trying to address the "what do I do alone" question. It's fine. Not going to keep you playing for 50 hours, but it's a decent distraction.

The online problem

I have to talk about the online, because it's the elephant in the room. GigaBash's netcode is playable but not great, and the player base is small. On any given evening you might find a match quickly or you might wait a while. The matchmaking can pair you with players of wildly different skill levels. For a game that lives and dies on multiplayer, this is a real issue.

The honest truth is that GigaBash is best played locally. Four players, same couch, same screen. That's where the game shines brightest and where its design makes the most sense. The S-Class transformation has maximum impact when the person next to you starts yelling. The trash talk, the alliances, the betrayals. All of that is amplified by physical proximity. If you don't have local multiplayer friends, GigaBash is still fun, but you're getting maybe 60% of the experience.

Where it sits in the genre

GigaBash is the best kaiju brawler you can play right now. I'll say that plainly. It's not the best kaiju brawler ever made, because War of the Monsters exists and that game was doing things in 2003 that still haven't been topped. If you want the full shortlist, I've written up my picks for the best kaiju games worth your time, and GigaBash is near the top of it. But GigaBash is the best modern option by a wide margin, and it's the only current-gen game that's even trying to be a proper kaiju fighting game.

The genre is weirdly underserved. Kaiju are huge in film, in anime, in toy culture. Godzilla movies make hundreds of millions at the box office. And yet the list of good kaiju games is embarrassingly short. GigaBash stands out partly because it's genuinely good and partly because it has almost no competition. If a AAA studio ever made a kaiju brawler with a big budget, top-tier netcode, and a roster of 30 monsters, GigaBash would be in trouble. But nobody's doing that, so here we are.

What GigaBash gets absolutely right is the fantasy. You feel like a giant monster wrecking a city while fighting other giant monsters. The scale reads correctly. The destruction feels earned. The S-Class moments create genuine hype. The roster has personality. For a mid-budget game from a relatively small studio, the amount of polish on display is impressive. Passion Republic clearly loves this genre, and that shows in every monster design, every arena layout, every particle effect when a building comes down.

What it doesn't get right is the depth. The combat is accessible but shallow. The online is functional but underpopulated. The single-player is there but not compelling. These are real weaknesses, and they limit how much time you'll spend with the game if you're playing solo or if you need mechanical depth from your fighters.

If you have friends, controllers, and any affection for giant monsters hitting each other, get GigaBash. It's the kaiju game we have, and it's a good one. Not a perfect one, not the genre-defining masterpiece that kaiju fans deserve, but a fun, earnest, well-crafted brawler that delivers on its core promise. Four monsters enter a city. One monster leaves. The city doesn't.