By Gary Kearney
President Kong. Mr. Kong. Kong, Esq. Principle Kong. Nope, none of those
quite capture the needed vibe as much as King Kong and choosing the right name
probably had a lot to do with King Kong being such a well known movie figure. As
you may know, King Kong is a really big gorilla from a movie of the same name
made way back in 1933 and recently remade by Lord of the Rings director Peter
Jackson. (Yes, I know all about the the 1976 version but for the sake of quality
I'm going to pretend it never happened.) Now from UbiSoft comes the game for the
movie with the very specific title Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game
of the Movie, or PJKK:TOGOTM for short. It used to be a guarantee that if a game
was based on a movie it would be horrible, but there have been some recent
examples that the trend is ending and King Kong is another in that new trend.
But is it actually good or just not horrible? Let's see...
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| I am Kong, hear me roar. |
King Kong the game follows the story of the movie. In case you don't know the
story of the movie it goes a little like this: A group of people go to an
uncharted, or at least poorly charted, island aptly named Skull Island where
they run into a bunch of prehistoric animals, some unhappy islanders, and one
rather large ape...Kong. Things happen, people die, Kong and an actress make an
emotional connection, and the group decides to capture the big monkey and take
him back to New York where they plan on making a ton of money showing him off.
Once in New York Kong escapes, crawls up the Empire State building with his new
friend, watches an air show from up close, and takes a bad fall. More or less
the same things happen in the game and for the most part it is a lot of fun to
be going along the journey.
In Kong you play as two different characters, Jack Driscoll in first person
and Kong in third person. My first thought was that I really didn't want to
spend much time playing as Jack. I mean when you have the chance to play as King
Kong over a playwright you've got to go with the big guy. But after playing for
a while it turns out that the more enjoyable sections are the ones with Jack.
This works out for the best since you end up playing through Jacks eyes more
than as Kong. As Jack you are guided and helped out by filmmaker Carl and the
first-mate of the ship you sailed on, Hayes. Jack has a few guns on him but very
little ammo is laying around so you end up using a lot of bones and spears as
weapons. It gets a little repetitive grabbing and tossing bones around as does
the need to keep burning vines out of your way. There is a lot of action in the
game and I suppose that the developers felt we needed breaks from the really fun
stuff so they added the need to go hunting for levers to open gates. I certainly
could have done without that.
Jack has all sorts of scary and creepy things that wants to do him harm and
while having a giant dino chase after you is always cool, but I'm not a big fan
of crawly creatures so I kind of got the grossed out by all of the bugs that
were around. But there is no doubt the whole experience can raise your heart
beat and that is a good thing in a game.
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