I’ll not try and pull the fur over your eyes and claim King Kong is an adventure game, for it’s not, but it is a magnificent adventure to experience. It is nonstop and propels forward at a breakneck pace that is so exciting that it will soon have you in the palm of Kong’s paw.

If you are the type of gamer who shies away from action, frustrated with complicated controls and submenus, then this is the game for you as the controls are as intuitive as any game ever developed and the onscreen HUD is nonexistent. And don’t let the fact that the game is played in the first-person perspective be misleading for this is not a first-person shooter even though you can equip and use a pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, machine gun, bones and spears.

Kong’s Creative Director, the talented Michel Ancel, was handpicked by Peter Jackson, and is known to adventure gamers for the underappreciated Beyond Good & Evil. But anyone who played BG&E is aware that Ancel is skilled at making old game conventions seem fresh which is why Kong feels like an entirely new experience.

The game is not a simple scene by scene adaptation of the movie, but instead often veers off into other directions by introducing new parts of Skull Island not in the film. And whereas the first hour of the movie covers the voyage to Skull Island, the second hour Skull Island and the final hour New York, the game begins at Skull Island and stays there for about 90% of the game before moving to the inevitable conclusion in New York.

All of the now-classic characters are present and voiced by their film counterparts – Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow, damsel in distress; Jack Black as Carl Denham, the risk-taking cameraman, and of course Adrien Brody as Jack Driscoll, who has been upgraded from sailor to playwright.

Aboard the ship Venture, the crew reaches Skull Island, surrounded in fog, and is soon separated. Ann is soon captured by Kong and Jack must race to rescue her. But here is the great twist – not only will you play as Jack, but at times you will be Kong, the 8th Wonder of the World.

The sequences in which you play as Kong are fewer in number then those that you play as Jack, which makes them all that more exciting (What some of these gamers who complain about not enough action in a game don’t understand is that if there is too much of the same thing, then it quickly becomes boring and its uniqueness is diminished). When playing as Kong the view shifts to a third person perspective. Kong is much more assertive then playing as Jack (c’mon, you didn’t really think Kong would be cerebral) and can swat, charge, jump, throw and go into a fury by beating his chest and roaring. It is during these furies or when slowly, but firmly snapping the jaw of a large opponent that you feel like the king of the jungle and may even beat your own chest and let out a roar (my apologies to my wife for waking her!). The initial appearances of both Kong and later the T. Rex are both very cinematic and spectacular and will send chills down your spine.

As for Jack, while he is adept with all of the available weapons, playing as his character never feels unrealistic. Part of this may be as there are no endurance bars or limitations to his movements. Instead, audio and visual clues are used to gauge your character’s health and progress and you will not be making any superhuman jumps across chasms and, in fact, the character can not even jump!

Supplies for Jack and his traveling companions at any given time are refurnished in a unique and realistic manner as a plane searches for the scrambled crew and drops boxes of supplies in their immediate areas while it is searching the island for a safe landing area. The buzzing of Captain Englehorn’s propellers is always a welcome noise and a hint that you should search the ground or tree branches for a crate. Jack will always throw or shoot in the direction he is facing the game will usually compensate for not having auto-aim by usually targeting the center of your intended foe.

Defeating many of these enormous foes, such as T-Rexes, giant dragonflies and crabs, pterodactyls and more, is not the time consuming until it becomes boring chore that is common in many games and there is actually some wonderful strategy involved. As Skull Island is a living environment, this can be used to your advantage. If you are trapped in a clearing that is blocked by a large T-Rex and a few pterodactyls flying overhead, if you slay the T-Rex the pterodactyls will swoop down to feed off the carcass leaving you free to advance. If you feel especially gruesome, you can sneak up to the carcass later to take note of how much flesh has been devoured. At times, you need not even kill anything at all if you just take advantage of the surround bramble and burn it with a torch (though it does at times seem as though the game has a scorched earth policy as secondary character Hayes yells more than once to burn everything in sight). My only small complaint here is at times I felt as though I was the trigger man in a prehistoric shooting gallery.

The few puzzles in Kong are of the ‘find the lever’ variety and to be honest should have been omitted from the game. This game is about feeling as though you are actually wading through swamps, shooting the rapids or walking cautiously beneath the underbelly of a Brontosaurus (thank goodness they seem to be asexual). There are no cheap deaths, you will not fall off a cliff due to poor programming. Though there are extras available – such as the option to play the game in black-and-white once – these extras are not obtained by artificial means such as collecting coins, etc. by are based upon your completion percentage.

Gameplay is compressed which is what gives it such a ‘you are there’ feel, but this also leads to another problem which is a game that can be completed in about 10 hours which is about thrice the length of the movie. If you do the math the average movie ticket is about $8 and the game costs around $50 so you have to decide if you want to spend the bucks.

If there is one area in which King Kong is sorely lacking, it is for failing to convey that feeling of depression when Kong topples from the Empire State Building, for failing to convey that soulful look of helplessness in the eyes of the main characters. While the game maintains an amazing feat of immersion, we still never feel the depth of Kong’s emotions for Ann. The only emotional impact is an adrenaline rush, but this is more the failure of the limitations of a medium that only seems to know how to portray violence than the game.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong is the most exciting, immersive game you will play this year, and almost any other year for that matter. Hopefully, it will set the standards for future movie-based games much as the 1933 film set standards for future generations of film-makers. So play as Kong, play as man, but just play.