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.

Final Grade: A
(find out more about our
grading system)