King Kong the game is an excellent supplement to Peter Jackson's film...
Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a detailed and engaging struggle primarily in the former vein, in which the player, as the movie’s Jack Driscoll, is never more than one step ahead of his own demise. However, the player is periodically given a chance to rumble in the jungle as Kong himself, and those sequences are more closely related to the gleeful destruction found in Painkiller. Combining the high-level intensity of Jack’s story with Kong’s cathartic fits of aggression makes for a perfect mix of roller-coaster moments.
While it’s true that the game is very short, there are few gaps in Jack’s portion of the story; the player sticks by him from the moment he wakes up on Skull Island until just before Kong’s capture. The moments in between contain a near-constant assault on the senses, primarily due to the designers’ ingenious environmental design. With lush tropical visuals and astonishingly effective sound cues, I found myself sweeping my mouse back and forth quite often, trying to take in the living jungle full of waterfalls and fields of mist with layered particle effects. It was during these ponderous moments that a millipede or venatosaurus would lunge, the latter dragging my blood-hazed line of sight to the ground with my legs in full view inside of the creature’s gnashing jaws.
To avoid such a fate, Jack must keep a close eye on his ammo reserves. Once the pistol and Thompson rounds are all used up, Jack’s fate depends entirely on splintered bones scavenged from animal carcasses or, if he’s lucky, a relatively well-honed spear. Brushfires play a huge offensive and defensive role (although they tend to ruin my poor old machine’s framerate) and even create natural barriers similar to the natives’ levered doors. Kong must also clear a few overgrown passages with the help of his new friend Ann. In fact, I appreciated those cooperative puzzle sequences all the more as an expansion on the beauty/beast companionship that was portrayed so well in Jackson’s movie.
Jackson and company also did a great job of portraying Skull Island – where even the crickets and tubeworms can make a snack out of a burly fellow – as the most dangerous place on the planet. Ubisoft’s designers place several of the same monsters in Jack’s path, from the impressive V-Rex eating machines that were prominently featured, to the scorpions that only appeared in one brief scene, and even further to the stealthy swamp critters that were created just for the game. Each oversized dinosaur and bug boasts a nice level of cunning, as they’ll run from fire, circle deftly around obstacles, and select their prey according to convenience (which is how Jack can often distract the creatures with a sacrificial bat or dragonfly).
If Jack can survive long enough to top the next rise or reach the end of a river rafting adventure, Kong steps up for a comparatively relaxing episode of leaping, climbing, swatting, and crushing. The simian sequences are very impressive in their scale, in terms of both the massive trees and cliffs along which Kong can clamber and the brutal thrashing he inflicts on anything that dares to threaten his girlfriend. The waterfall-fed valleys and, later, the cavernous streets of New York can give players an essential break from the bated-breath frights of Jack Driscoll’s struggle. This title is an exciting and well-paced companion to Peter Jackson’s film.