There's loads of games out there that handle giant mecha fighting each other, and some of them fighting monsters.

This is WAY more than just generic mechs vs monsters though - this IS Pacific Rim!!!

All of the lore, the monsters, the tech for how drifting works, and it plays like being in the movies. Characters can do so much more than just being in Jaegers!

I ran this for friends over the weekend and they loved it so much that I felt it was worth jumping on here to review.

A new and interesting take on giant monsters and how to fight them in a roleplaying game. The Neural Handshake/Drift mechanic is on point with the setting, and the "Bonded Twins" Class can be a very cool way to run your own Jaeger if you don't want to deal with another player. An excellent addition to the Everyday Heroes family.

While there were some issues with this product (very slow load times from each page), they can be mitigated in most formats. However, I just could not figure out how they were going to make piloting a Jaeger seem cool. Like, does one pilot move and another attack? Who gets the left arm?

Evil Genius cracked their knuckles and said, "We got you, son," and proceeded to come up with some really interesting, intuitive, and EASY TO RUN systems that actually make me look forward to spawning kaiju from the abyssal depths of my imagination to wreak ruin upon the WORLD!!!

My psychiatrist is working with me, OK?

The way Jaegers take damage, and how kaiju are handled, are well done. They keep the challenge of the original metaphors Del Toro introduced, and make sure you're not going to have typical 5E characters climbing up them Shadow of the Colossus style. I could keep going...but I'd rather you buy the book! :)

Giant robots, Kaijun ? What's not to like. All that with a familiar ruleset adapted to perfection to the setting. A pleasure !

love the system and artwork. i was very dissapointed in the PDF. its slow and pauses whenever you try to scroll, probably due to the graphics being oversized. whats really annoying is the Everyday Heroes core book dosnt have this problem despite having much more artwook so in summary, goot book but unusable

I wasn't sure about this system when the Kickstarter launched, so I didn't back it. I see I made a mistake. The system looks good, and the books (I've since bought everything except Escape from New York) that's out now, and I'm going to buy Kong as soon as it comes out here. The quality of the PDF is very good (though there are some charts with issues on Good Reader and Preview, Acrobat doesn't have the issue so it's not a deal killer for me).

Specifically for Pacific Rim, they include a larger scale called "Titanic Scale" to handle Kaiju and Jaegers. Its very similiar to Mega Damage in Rifts, and works in this situation because a normal person realistically can't really interact with a monster that's hundreds of feet tall in a meaningful way (except as toe jam). You need something like a Jaeger to fight Kaiju, and if everyone is doing that, then wouldn't it be much easier to scale the ranges, damage, and effects of these things to more manageable numbers/sizes instead of having kaiju do 100d6 damage for a light attack and take up your entire game table if you want to use battlemaps?

You can also customize your Jaeger with gear and equipment, though there aren't a ton of options they are enough to make them each unique without inducing option paralysis. There are two different kinds of resource limits, the bulk of the equipment and the neural load imposed upon the pilots. Bulk is the same concept as Everyday Heroes uses for normal scale eqipment. Neural load, though, limits the individual equipment a character can use and is based upon their proficiency bonus. Your Jaeger could have a weapon installed with a 4 NL, but if your prof bonus is only 2 or 3, you won't be able to activate it, making it dead weight since it still has the same bulk. Its a reasonable way to handle different characters having access to better equipment in hteir Jaegers as they level up.

Jaeger don't have hit points, and at first I was a bit skeptical about this choice. Instead, damage done to the Jaeger is split among the characters piloting it as psychic damage. The Jaegers can still be damaged, but this is handled through damage to specific systems. Your Jaeger could have a weapon damaged, or an arm blown off, and there are systems for getting this damage fixed and backgrounds features that can make this process faster. I think it's a good way to handle Jaegers without having a ton of additional data to track. Kaiju can also have location based damage like this, but they only have one damage level for each location, in addition to having overall hit points. This reduces the number of things the GM has to track, while retaining flavor and distinctiveness.

There are rules for The Drift from the movies, and this is one of the things I think they nailed in these rules. To pilot a Jaeger for more than a few seconds, you need two characters to share the "neurological load". This process doesn't always work flawlessly, and some people are more compatible with other specific people than others. Depending on how well two people are able to connect, you might find the Jaeger doesn't operate very well (like having disadvantage on all rolls), all the way to being better than the sum of its parts (using the better of the two pilots rolls on every action, and doing more damage if both pilots succeed in an attack, for example). I think there's some great role playing potential in this system.

There's a new class for the Wise Hero archetype called Bonded Twins. While I like this, since the Jaegers require two pilots, I'm not certain on how they are supposed to operate 100%. The concept is for a single player to have 2 characters so they can pilot a full sized Jaeger "by themselves" without needing to make two whole characters up. And I think I understand how'd they work (they have couple of pages explaining them), and they have some benefits over a traditiomal character, but they have downsides, too. They appear to be balanced, but I think I'd have to play one in an actual game to see how they work for sure.

Reading this has me very interested in the King Kong rules that are due out in a couple of days, as the two sets of rules are supposed to be compatible.