Kabuto, of course, has no need for a base. If anything, he IS the base (he's certainly big enough). Rather than employing Smarties as his workers he employs them as his food, picking them up and tossing them into his cavernous mouth to gain health and also grow – he starts off house sized and ends up mountain sized after eating enough Smarties. Instead of guns or spells Kabuto has his fists and feet, and when you're as big as Kabuto that's more than enough. Even better, when he grows to full size he gains a slowly recharging adrenaline bar that you can tap to perform some truly devastating moves – hold the adrenaline button until the bar drains all the way, click the right mouse button and he'll catapult himself into the air and land on his oversized butt, crushing whatever lies beneath him (including even massive Sea Reaper fortresses) and literally sending huge ripples through the landscape. Playing as Kabuto you actually feel like this immense monster – houses and creatures that were previously bigger than you when you played a Meccaryn or Delphi are suddenly no bigger than Kabuto's hand. It's a fantastic feeling and it only gets better once you start merrily toppling trees and crushing enemies with nothing but your footsteps.
In multiplayer, of course, Kabuto is pretty over powered compared to the other characters, but then Planet Moon suggests that the best and most balanced possible multiplayer game is actually played with three Sea Reapers, five Meccaryns and one Kabuto. Even playing unbalanced multiplayer games can be fun though – after repeated stompings and chompings by Kabuto I finally managed to kill him as a Sea Reaper with a cunning succession of spells and a fair amount of luck and it was most satisfying indeed.
Multiplayer can, at times, be a little problematic though. In fact, the otherwise superb game suffers from a number of unfortunate bugs. Multiplayer games sometimes freeze or simply drop a connection, and it really needs a LAN to be reliable and playable. It also silently bombed into windows on me twice with no error message or anything, and these were the only two times that the lack of an in-game save feature annoyed me. Normally, the missions are either short enough to be painlessly retried or they leave your base intact after you die so you only have to round up a few smarties to pick up where you left off. However, if the game crashes you have to start your base building from square one, which can be a little tiresome a second time around. The mouse invert feature also refused to stay on the setting I preferred (inverted, although it calls in not inverted for some reason) and had to be set back to my preferred setting each time I started a game. Granted, it only took five seconds, but I'd still rather spend even that short a period in the game rather than a menu screen. Finally, the frame rate can start to chug a touch at times, especially when Kabuto really starts tearing things apart, even on a 900 megahertz machine with a GeForce 2. Giants looks damn, damn good indeed, but unless you're willing to turn down a few graphics settings you'll pay for such gorgeous models and landscapes with an occasionally choppy frame rate.
