Unsteady motion requires forgiveness. Exacting movement demands precision. Giga Wrecker Alt's puzzle-platforming wants to have it both ways and gets trapped between frustration and satisfaction. For all of its inventive mechanics and generous agency, Giga Wrecker Alt could have benefited from more clarity and cohesion.
Giga Wrecker Alt is a game in which the player mercilessly bashes, slices, and torpedoes evil robots into obliterated piles of scrap. That wreckage is then gathered into a massive trash ball and used to influence environmental objects to solve physics-based challenges. Puzzles and combat are questions that can be answered with the same set of tools, albeit with wildly unstable—and sometimes maddening—results. Giga Wrecker Alt prepares the player for a range of possibilities but has trouble communicating its boundaries. It’s gifted and plagued by the same set of values.
The player assumes the role of a newly-christened cyborg, Reika Rekkeiji. Reika didn’t want to be a human with robot appendages, but Doctor Kozuki happened upon her decimated body and used machine parts to repair her. What follows are vague details about the future—some kind of man-versus-machine conflict—before Giga Wrecker Alt rolls in themes of the ethics of revenge, man’s relationship with technology, and the nature of hostility. Profuse dialogue between Reika and Kozuki, along with more characters that come in and out of the narrative with each level, are influenced by anime tropes but not especially bound to them. Giga Wrecker Alt’s writing (or localization) can be spastic, but, sometimes, it manages to be poignant, too.Reika’s cyborg body entitles her to a new set of abilities. She can bash specially-marked pieces of the environment into rubble, and then she can form it into a ball that hovers over her head. If that trash pile is larger than any aggressive, patrolling robot, she can bash and destroy them with it. Then that scrap pile can be added to the heap. Depending on the amount of garbage collected, Reika can transform it into a small, medium, or large cube. These help Reika reach higher platforms and weighing down other platforms to help reach otherwise inaccessible areas.
Character development is measured with statistical and material upgrades. Blue gems locked inside of scrap, both in the environment and in enemy robots, are released when the target is destroyed. It all collects into a point level and can be spent in a skill tree to increase vitality, expand the reach of her melee attack, and boost her health regeneration time. With narrative progression, Reika also gains the ability to morph her trash ball into a sword, a javelin, and a drill. The sword makes precise cuts on objects in the environment, the javelin is good for instantly creating platforms, and the drill wipes out an entire horizontal line of the tile-based environment (which is great for collapsing partial ceilings on larger robots).
Giga Wrecker Alt has a bewildering sense of aesthetic organization. Each of its four levels are separated by color and theme. Each also break down into a collection of connected rooms, easily indicated and viewed through a map on the pause menu. Color configuration creates mental separation between each level, but it all kind of homogenizes into the same garish mass. Camera zooms aren’t friendly toward place and position, and Reika’s physical size seems to be in a state of flux. Giga Wrecker Alt is either too zoomed-out or too zoomed-in, and an overworked tile set isn’t good at creating much distinction. With its Metroidvanian aspects—some areas can be accessed much later with certain upgrades—it’s tough to remember what is where, even with a map.
Each module of the map is effectively a puzzle room. Most solutions demand the player orchestrate some kind of physics-based solution to the common problem of, “how do I get over there?” This can be done by pouring rubber on your trash ball and bouncing it into a platform, throwing a platform off balance so it spills its rolling cog into a bigger machine, bouncing lasers off of reflective objects, or, my favorite, building towers of garbage that ram into other towers of garbage in a controlled demolition. Some problems demand exact solutions and others, due to the wonky nature of Giga Wrecker Alt’s physics system, allow you to fudge it a little bit. It’s fun to create some chaos and then discover that it was all by design.
There’s logic to Giga Wrecker Alt’s operation. You usually need some immediate material, which means seeking out and destroying the nearest, tiniest enemy. Once you have some scrap to work with, you can start experimenting with objects in the environment. If you take out one of the two columns supporting a structure, for example, it will seesaw one side into a de facto bridge to a higher part of the level. Figuring out how to use a swivel to swing to safety is another. Usually there are larger enemies (and some nasty flowers that incessantly spew homing bombs) to complicate your plans.
Game flow follows a comfortable model. Each level has a series of locked doors that need to be activated by a predetermined number of terminals. Reaching these terminals, as one might expect, composes the objective in each puzzle room. You usually don’t have to get the maximum reach that level’s boss fights—battles which bring Giga Wrecker Alt closer to Mega Man—as the high-terminal-count doors typically house cosmetic options for your weapons. A quick-travel system, provided you’ve found the required stations, is also available.
Giga Wrecker Alt’s liberal use of its physics system can also get it into trouble. Sometimes I have no idea if I’ll be able to make the shortest jump or if I’ll plunge to my doom. Other times, when I need to gather the debris of vanquished foes, their parts will swing over my head and fall into oblivion when it should have gathered into my trash orb. There are other instances where blocks don’t fall as planned despite identical action from the player. Infrequent checkpoints force the possibility of completing puzzles all over again, which is as irritating as it is pointless. Giga Wrecker debuted on PC two years ago and it still doesn’t have a satisfactory level of polish.
Regardless of clear and obvious aggravations, there’s more of Giga Wrecker Alt to love than despise. Game Freak, whom you may recognize from developing Pokémon for the last two decades, isn’t often enabled to express their creativity on other genres. From Pulseman to Tembo the Badass Elephant, their extracurricular work mirrors Treasure ability to produce games that are bursting with so many ideas the whole thing feels like it might explode. There’s an innocence at play in Giga Wrecker Alt, even if it can’t settle down and play by its own rules.
Unsteady motion requires forgiveness. Exacting movement demands precision. Giga Wrecker Alt’s puzzle-platforming wants to have it both ways and gets trapped between frustration and satisfaction. For all of its inventive mechanics and generous agency, Giga Wrecker Alt could have benefited from more clarity and cohesion.
