My neck ached when the credits started to roll. Of course, it had been hurting already for a while. More than three hours after it started, the new King Kong movie was over and despite its monstrous length, at no point had I wished it would hurry up and finish. I was having too much fun with the thrilling action and engaging story.
With that in mind I have to ask how the video game version, while having such a short length, manages to become boring? Although Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (insert your own lengthy-title joke) innovates in many ways and offers a fair share of thrills, it ultimately grows stale and leaves much to be desired.
The game begins with video right from the film that introduces the reason our heroes have for going to Skull Island in the depressed 1930s. However, after the game starts the action and events never match up to what happens in the film in more than the most general of ways. From Anne’s capture by the natives to a major character’s death, the same events occur, but in different ways that are not explained by any gameplay considerations. Obviously, adaptations must add sequences not seen in the source material, but failing to recreate set pieces from the film defeats the purpose of a tie-in.
A tie-in it remains, though, and you therefore play as the reluctant script-writer-turned-hero Jack Driscoll, and, less often, as the gigantic ape that prefers blondes. Your progress is saved at closely placed checkpoints that reload quickly if you die or fail an objective, allowing quick access to any part of the game. Altogether, there are 40 episodes, the majority of which are first-person shooter sequences starring Jack.
The most striking difference between King Kong and other shooters is the absence of a heads-up display. You see what Jack would see and nothing else. That’s right—no cross hair. Ammunition and health are handled intuitively. Jack announces how many magazines he has left, a feature that may sound as annoying to you as it originally did to me, but actually works well and unobtrusively.
When Jack is hit, the screen reddens with blood creeping in around the edges. His breathing speeds up and the pulse races and it feels a lot like Call of Duty 2 or, possibly, methamphetamines. If you avoid taking any more damage, Jack’s body stops freaking out and everything is fine again.
It is possible to turn on the cross hair, inventory, and ammo count, but it does not make the game easier and lessens the level of immersion that distinguishes the gameplay.
While traipsing through the wilderness Jack makes use of firearms dropped by the ship’s captain from his pontoon plane. The guns—a pistol, a shotgun, and a scoped rifle—have an arcade quality and hit things that are in the middle area of your screen thanks to some friendly auto-aim.
Ammunition is not abundant and, if guns are used exclusively, it will quickly run dry. Thus, Jack makes use of numerous pointy objects scattered throughout the environment by nature and the natives.
Jack can pick up spears and bones and use them against the various beasts in either a poking or a throwing manner. The throwing is the more deadly attack by far—even a bit better than the guns. By using the tools provided by man and the island, you should never be without defense or unable to handle the many threats the jungle houses.
The threats range from bats that dive at you to centipedes that jump at you to small dinosaurs that lurch at you.
The combat is repetitive when facing small foes and my usual thought was, “Oh, they’re rushing me again, I hope I can grab bone shards fast enough to keep them from hitting me twice.” The limited health is often frustrating because if a centipede, for instance, succeeds in striking me, my vision becomes obscured, balance takes a vacation, and it is difficult to hit the creature or creatures that were attacking you before they hit you again, causing death.
At times, wild and desperate shotgun unloading in an attempt to escape from a raptor’s jaws can be thrilling, but mostly it’s just annoying. At least the game features some limited auto-balancing abilities where enemies are subtracted or added depending on how well you are performing. [8Bats]
Jack is also pitted against larger threats that cannot be killed. While facing vastatosaurus rex, the King Kong version of a T-Rex, you must use the environment to stay out of its reach and avoid a quick death.
Another sequence takes place in a valley full of migrating brontosauruses (not apatosauruses) that don’t even notice Jack, much less care if they trample him. As they thunder past on all sides, dust is thrown up and other critters scatter from under foot and the effect is exhilarating because your only hope is to run.
Another laudable element of the combat is a food chain that has the creatures eating others that fall. Thus, well-placed kills can distract other threats and allow you to slip by and conserve both ammunition and time. All together, Jack’s combat varies between fighting small critters that want to eat you and fleeing from big critters that want to eat you. It is often repetitive but does have some set pieces that are both challenging and fun.
The other basic obstacles on the island include grassy, unmovable weeds that are knee high and completely impenetrable for no apparent reason. Jack must find a torch to wage total war against the stubborn flora. Often intertwined with the weedy conundrums are searches for sticks that can be used to turn levers and open primitive gates.
While it appears that any stick would do the job, you must search for a specific one that is often strategically strewn behind a patch of those resilient weeds, such as in the brontosaurus episode. At least these contrived quests take you off the main and extremely linear path of the game’s levels. I thought the jungle would be a little more open to exploration, but this is not your Farcry’s island.
Even mighty Kong can’t go anywhere he pleases. While the portions of the game played as Kong share the on-a-rail quality of Jack’s trip, the gameplay is mostly opposite from the pathetic human. While Jack has to look around every corner and exercise caution, Kong storms through the jungle fearing next-to-nothing.
The game captures the feeling of a being a twenty-five foot gorilla and Kong smashes through most obstacles and enemies alike with ease. Those venatosauruses that gave Jack so much trouble? A snack for our larger protagonist. What fun would this be without some larger challenges?
The greatest part of being Kong is brawling with vastatosaurus rexes. Activating Kong’s “Rage” makes him stronger and faster and is the best way the tenacious predators. Generally, anything smaller is easy to dispatch, which is a major part of what makes Kong fun: feeling his power, rage, and even grace as he swings from (highly linear) limbs.
Swinging, moving, and fighting can all be very cinematic. The player has no control over the third person camera which allows for the view to change dynamically and deliver shots similar to what the film offers. Perhaps the best example is when Kong is leaping through the jungle to save Ann from two Tyrannosauruses. When it is time for the final jump, the camera switches to a close-up of Ann and her attackers with Kong in the background that allows the player to witness the spectacle of Kong bursting onto the scene and delivering the first blow. It is simply majestic.
However, in other parts of the game, the camera’s tendency to move by itself causes frustration and, much to Kong’s distress, his death. For instance, when lumbering down a New York street I tried to turn right down a side street where a cannon lurked. But, the camera moved from behind Kong to behind the cannon so my turn down the street turned into a collision with a building and quick death.
While not always dangerous, traveling in one direction only to switch without warning is aggravating each of the numerous times it happens. Loss of control is the side effect of cinematic presentation, so it is unfortunate the developers were not able to minimize this.
Even when the camera is cooperating perfectly, other game mechanics may sabotage your progress. During the first episode played as Kong, I ran into frustration that no other game I had played this year could hope to match. I scaled a cliff in order to reclaim Ann from the clutches of a giant bat-thing. The kind game, still teaching me how to control Kong, told me to “dash” whenever the creature got in position to dive at me. The key command given appeared to damage the beast when performed correctly (which was rare).
However, it was actually as effective as angrily squinting at him, which I was also doing. In the end I played the sequence over two million times trying to land enough “hits” to kill the thing and each time having to sit through an in-game cut scene because of the save point’s location. I eventually figured out that standard Kong tactics worked great, but ten minutes later the game froze in the middle of a level-transition and I was forced to once again fight that stupid, stupid bat. I encountered the same freeze error once more while playing through the game. These problems were not common, but were severe enough to detract from the smooth and rapid progression the game fosters and definitely removed me from any emotional investment in the story.
Assuming you are not attempting certain sequences ad nauseum, the pace of King Kong is non-stop with the core gameplay lasting between five to ten hours depending on your skill. After that, there is no multi-player and no reason to replay episodes and try different strategies. As the game progresses, though, extra content was unlocked like design galleries from the movie. After the first time you beat the game a point system is added that allows further bonuses to be unlocked, including a gameplay episode with an alternate, PETA-friendly ending.
Oddly, the many of the extras are more linked to the King Kong movie than the game is. It is called “Game of the Movie,” and not “Game Based on the Movie,” but the latter is strangely accurate. For all that is made of Peter Jackson and Weta’s cooperation and support, the developers seem to only have had a list of characters and a vague outline to work with.
There are scenes of Kong fighting three V-Rexes, but they’re nothing like what happened in the film. There is a herd of brontosauruses but they’re not encountered as they were on the big screen. You fight bugs through the game, but not after falling off the log. When Kong goes to New York, it is odd that his experiences are completely different from and not exciting as those in its source material. Because there is no apparent reason for the differences, it seems a sad waste.
While the script may not have been relied upon, Ubisoft has done a competent job of translating to the small screen the visuals and audio Weta created, although there are some dissapointments. Kong’s roar rumbles with bass and all the ambient sounds are all effective and convincing, as are those attached to the creatures you attract.
Sadly, the voicework, especially that of Jack Black, leaves much to be desired. I cannot understand Black receiving any accolades for his work because his lines sound nothing like a movie and just like he was casually rehearsing them on his back porch.
Visually, the important thing is that the jungles are lush and filled with breathtaking sites. This is done so well that numerous graphical shortcomings are actually easy to overlook. Environment textures are blurry, character models blocky, many plants are laughably two dimensional, and New York is really just plain looking. In particular, because of the fidelity shown to what Jack would actually see, I wish the game fleshed out Jack’s person and showed his legs when you looked down.
However, some parts look perfect, as when Kong goes into a rage and the world turns sepia and the action unfolds in slow motion, highlighting each monstrous blow he delivers. The overall impression the game leaves is that the graphics do their job of bringing to life a fantastic world and I was struck by its beauty.
However, boredom also struck me as I played (and especially when I replayed) many of the levels. Creature, stab, repeat. Kong is the real star of this show, but his share of the game is woefully small. Even New York, which is played entirely as Kong, is short with an unsatisfying climax.
While King Kong impresses with an immersive and HUD-less jungle, great battles between titanic creatures, and some inspired visuals, too much of its already brief journey is spent on the numbing journey of Jack. Even though people paid exorbitantly to see the fictional Kong in exhibition, this game does not have enough of the 8th wonder to justify the price of admission.
Technical Notes
The PC version of the game installs the StarForce rootkit as part of its copy protection. The graphics of the standard PC version of the game that was reviewed are comparable to the PS2 and the Xbox versions, but with beefed up resolutions and support for anti-aliasing/anisotropic filtering. There is a “Gamer’s Edition” for the PC that can only be purchased online that features graphics theoretically comparable to the Xbox 360’s (on Hi-Def Tvs), but with significantly higher system requirements.
System Requirements
- Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP
- 1.0 GHz AMD Athlon™ or Intel® Pentium® III (2.5 GHz Pentium IV or AMD Athlon™ recommended) processor
- 256 MB (512 MB recommended) of RAM
- 64 MB(128 MB recommended) (see supported list) DirectX® 8.1 compliant video card
- DirectX® 8.1 compliant sound card
- DirectX 8.1 (DirectX 9.0c included on disc)
- 8x or faster (32x or faster recommended) CD-ROM drive
- 1.5 GB minimum free hard drive space
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Download the Gameplay Video (Xbox 360 version)
100 MB WMV (widescreen 16:9)
6 minutes 29 seconds