7MMO
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Key Preview Takeaways:
- March of Giants shakes up the somewhat-rigid MOBA genre in a compelling way.
- Matches aim to take 30 minutes or less.
- Strategies aplenty here; you’ve got plenty of options for how to achieve victory.
Two opposing armies seek to lay low their enemies' lines of fortifications, outlying outposts, and supply depots. They rely on coordinated pushes, often suicidal assaults for the many troops involved, to break their enemies' will. They seek to develop or acquire new strategies and technologies to break the stalemate of fighting over an ever-growing no man's land. I'm either describing Trench Warfare or the very popular MOBA genre, or, in the case of the upcoming March of Giants, both at the same time.
It's a MOBA that in the words of its lead designer wants to turn the arena into a battlefield. Players in the 4v4 matches are towering giants infused with mythical power who serve as champions and commanders for their side, shaping their three traditional lanes into a warfront with bastions of defense built up by the players—even pulling soldiers and supplies away to meet needs on another front.
I got to spend a day playing its current in-development build, and I think that it's looking surprisingly promising. I say surprising because the genre has historically been pretty set in stone. It's wild to challenge the titans of it like League of Legends and Dota 2. However, key developers on March of Giants also worked on another game you'd think was challenging immovable competition—Rainbow Six Siege, which in many ways went up against tactical shooter titan Counter-Strike and has survived and thrived to this day.
From what I saw, March of Giants is playing some of the same cards as Siege did, including one key decision: While it plans to incorporate the accessibility you expect from a game made in this decade, March of Giants doesn't dilute the genre. It has the hardcore things that have survived and thrived in the MOBA for years—from big stuff like separate skill leveling and complex itemization to the littler things like last hitting.
But it didn't feel tired. The big change is how the developers want the players to change and manipulate the battlefield. Commanding your retinue of soldiers is another ability in your arsenal as a player, as is placing battleworks that fortify positions and inevitably become ruins that shape the conflict's future.
In a typical match you can expect to contest a lane against one or more enemy heroes, all while trying to get experience points by taking out enemies and snatching up requisition points and supplies from the ruined city sections outside the attack lanes. The requisition is your money—used to upgrade your giant's own body. The supplies become battleworks, which can buy you an advantage in a pushed-forward lane or help your team hold on to a struggling one—a lot of which is down to what kind of hero you're playing and playing against. More on that later.
Battleworks aren't just defenses, either, but ironclad tanks, cavalry charges, and airship soldier drops. There's no RTS-style micro and basecraft going on here, but March of Giants is closer to the MOBA genre's RTS roots than I've felt a game has been in years. It reminds of the glory days of Warcraft 3 custom maps, where all kinds of wild ideas for what a MOBA could be were thought up and discarded.
As the match progresses you start to try and contest your enemy's supply depots and shop points, destroying them to empower your own team's abilities and deny enemies safe harbor. You also fight the opposing team over neutral objectives, like siege dozers that plow into enemy bunkers and towers like little else in the game. They're a perfect catalyst for a teamfight to kick off over, or for a lone sneaky hero to snap away from a distracted opposition. There's also bigger bosses to knock down—a vicious automated defense system and a rogue airship—that reward your team with big boosts to make strong pushes against the enemy, like a siege cannon that can reduce even end-game defenses to rubble.
To win, you just take out two of your enemy's three final citadels. It sounds easy, but the size of the March of Giants map is smaller than the map in other big-name MOBAs. You have breathing room, but once the match hits that 10- or 15-minute mark things start to get very claustrophobic—and any big game-winning push can have the entire enemy team there to defend it posthaste. And then it'll be over. March of Giants is designed to have its matches take roughly 20 to 30 minutes. I saw nothing longer than 25. I think you'll be able to get at least two, maybe three rounds played in an hour. It's a very appealing concept if you're fitting in gaming between other things. Of course, with the build freedom the developers are emphasizing, I could see a match that takes an extreme of 45 minutes or more.
The core of that flexibility is the characters. While many of them look like just another big dude, I'd encourage you to look deeper than the obvious ones on the art. There's also a skeleton. A werewolf. A tree. A cthulhu. A… whatever a Trench Maw is. Each character has a variety of builds: What order you get your skills while leveling, which items you buy, and eventually where you put the scarce augment points that boost your skills by making them longer ranged, able to shoot more projectiles, and a host of other stuff.
Iron Sister, for example, is a threatening mobile support character that can lay down some real damage, slow enemies, and anchor a defense. You could build that character into a strong support, laying out ability damage and team buffs and heals. You could also very easily build her skillset into an obnoxiously tanky menace that does her supporting from the middle of the enemy team. I didn't feel like the match or two I played as or against any given character even began to scratch the surface of what they could be built for.
I love this because it's playing into one of the best parts of a strong MOBA. Less is not more when it comes to character design, no: More is more. No single character is balanced against every other character: The ecosystem of characters as a whole is balanced. The game doesn't start when you spawn, it starts when you pick and counter-pick against the enemy team during the draft phase. That lets the developers embrace wackier out-there character designs like Trench Maw, who burrows around and spawns extra soldiers from the armored bunker on his back, or Dreadnought, whose entire toolkit revolves around locking down lanes with anti-titan bunkers that boost his skills.
While I must emphasize that March of Giants is definitely its own thing, it's a philosophy that reminds me more of Dota 2 than League of Legends, and that, I think, is a promising sign. From the way they spoke, the developers aren't going to put their foot on the scale and limit the freedom of what you can build a character into—but if you discover a wild new combo they're more likely to find out how to buff its counterplays than nerf it.
The new thing in March of Giants—and the thing I expect to see some insane community strategies come out of—are of course the systems for commanding soldiers and building battleworks. Your squad of soldiers is commanded with just two keys. One to send them out in a straight line or redirect their path mid-charge, another to recall them. With that simple system you can use your soldiers to do all manner of stuff. You can send them to gather supplies or money for you. You can break off small parties of them to serve as scouts, checking a spot of woods or ruined buildings for concealed enemies. You need soldiers to break open the defensive shields that allow enemy towers and bunkers to be damaged, and a charge of soldiers is also the most fearsome damage source against enemy giants! Indeed, swarming soldiers deal their own entire, unresistable damage type separate from attacks and ability damage.
Of course, Giants aren't defenseless. You can autoattack larger targets like guns and armored cars. But soldiers are too small to be targeted. Instead, you just left click to stomp. And watching the hundreds of soldiers dance around the screen didn't get old during the time I had to play. In fact, I felt like I was barely scratching the surface of an unexplored, complex new game system. Props to the March of Giants team for that.
That's not even to mention the Giants that change how their soldiers behave or give them buffs. Wolfgang's soldiers turn into a horde of ravenous werewolves, while Voidmaster turns them into tentacular cultists, and Ossuary turns his into a horde of ghosts who can pass through walls—hilarious for stealing supplies out from under the enemy's nose!
The real counter to soldiers is… your own side's soldiers and your battlework defenses. Laying out trenches stops charges cold, or at least slows them down. Anti-giant bunkers mean your enemy can't get close to follow up on a charge they sent in. And both of those are countered by hard pushes with ironclad tanks or cavalry charges. Like real trench warfare, however, you can't fight over the same ground forever. The ruins of buildings prevent things from being built in the same spot later on—a devastated no man's land that emerges naturally as the teams push back and forth through each others' lines of defense.
It keeps the matches snappy and prevents them from becoming stalemates.It's a nice parallel to March of Giants themes as a whole. You're at the peak of this industrial fantasy world's trench warfare—and the Giants are here to break it all down. More is more, baby.
While you're here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we've checked out recently!
Jon Bolding is a regular contributor to IGN who does most of his gaming on PC. Talk PC gaming with him on X/Twitter at @JonBolds.
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