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Did you hear that sound about a month back? The giant ‘click’ of a giant briefcase popping open in the offices of Ubisoft, filled with a 25-foot-tall, gorilla-shaped stack of money? Ahh, the sound of merchandising. Maybe you missed it, or maybe you no longer notice the million noises just like it - it’s become second nature for big-budget filmmakers to broach equally big-name developers before the movie is even out of the storyboards, kindly asking that they worry as little as possible about the ‘game’ and that they push their ‘product’ out the door to kick off a massive promotional campaign, as quickly as possible. It’s not hard to sacrifice that kind of integrity with a King-sized pile of money on your doorstep, and so Ubisoft did, by taking on the ridiculously-titled Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie. Oo oo oo aah aah aah.
It’s so easy to get off-topic in one of these reviews, where one can comment at length on the gutless, money-green conglomerate known loosely as entertainment. The point of this generalized, hackneyed posturing is, as even the most indiscriminate industry observers ought to know by now, that licensing can’t fix the problem of the time and substance it takes to create more than mediocre gameplay. And it’s a pretty bad case of licensing when even the abbreviation is a mile long.
It’s not totally ridiculous, however. With Wingnut Studios banking on the developer’s talent and rep for selling games to make it at least playable and promotional, PJKK:TOGM turns out to be both. To Ubi’s credit, they’ve managed to make their game a cinematic experience with lots of authenticity from a movie that wasn’t even released yet – but that falls far short of making it quality, varied, dynamic video game, which, with the likes of Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia on their resumé, was never that challenging for them before the rights to Jack Black’s face went out on a diamond-studded platter.
Indeed, it seems the makers enjoyed Peter Jackson’s own creative direction and had complete rights to his major motion picture event, a remake of the 1933 classic that probably has more in common with Jurassic Park and less with the stop-motion original. Players of the game who somehow avoided reality for five months and missed the film trailer can now expect the expected: a desperate filmmaker, his cast and his reluctant boating crew set out to film his major comeback movie on a lost, desert island. To all involved, it seems like early Hollywood magic in the making.
Thing is, this island’s not as deserted as it seems - King Kong, the 8th wonder of the world, lives here, and his tribal worshippers and giant reptilian adversaries aren’t about to make this shoot an easy one. Led by the hero Jack in the First-Person Shooter segments, the NPC cast follows Kong’s trail of destruction and pursues a rescue plane in a ‘Get from Point A to Point B’ level structure. Jack has one gun at a time his disposal, which he can switch up for the guns dropped by the plane or for the ones held by the NPC characters. Ammo is understandably scarce, but Jack finds armaments in the animal bones and native-made spears scattered about the island. Combat is kept simplistic for what, I daresay, are the casual gamers PJKK:TOGM is destined to attract – the aim is forgiving, the enemies are weak, and it takes multiple consecutive injuries to Jack to finally end it all. But frustration is in no way taking a day off – dimly-lit, skinny catwalks and undefined terrain will make it very hard to manoeuvre in short order, although the ‘levels’ themselves are oftentimes pointless straightaways providing little more than an intermission of dialogue. And talk about repetitive! Routine tasks like fetching sticks pushing doors open may be fine for dogs, but apparently they’re also fine for players of King Kong, along with overly-frequent arson of bushes, sniping AI-deficient foes, and just throwing stuff helluva far in general. Jack use pointy stick in fire and burn bad bushes! Jack put stick in pillar and turn it round ten times while door budges whole inch in ONE minute! Jack make bridge go boom! Who’s the ape here again? Admittedly, my file stands at only 58% of the way through, but I’m already finding Kong Nation to be a tad primitive. Oo oo.
When they cross paths with the beast, control sometimes passes to Kong in the aptly-named “Kong Mode” - a third-person, camera-directed brawl-a-thon where the visuals really shine and the gameplay finds its better moments as Kong swings, punches, pounds and bodychecks the opposition. When freed from his grasp, Ann will interact with the environment to clear new paths for her captor and saviour, but in spite of this these scenes are entirely linear, push-button affairs that require few reflexes or strategy. In addition, the mixtures of green, brown and bluein different amounts tend to blend together so badly that large visual cues like vines, pillars, and natural rock formations can be hard to find.
The presentation gives a technical-over-artistic impression - as soon as you’ve created a profile for your island adventure on the rather static, uniformly-dark title screen, you’ll see that the intro FMV is just the film trailer we’ve all seen a billion times. And so the tone is set for the game to come – very little original material injected into what is essentially a prolonged version of the film, complete with lifted dialogue and Ann’s scream repeated time and again, in an aquatic-coloured jungle that mostly offers boredom to the eye. And although it’s probably the second-best version this gen by hardware, the ‘cube version reviewed here doesn’t even look that good in motion - they’ve captured the features of the actors quite well in the character models, but they only ever run at their full rate when facing a featureless corner. Speaking of nondescript, the textures may be sharp enough, but on the whole they lack significant detail and artistry– total emphasis on Kong and the NPCs and tie-ins to the film, no frills spared on environments. The myopic draw distance usually shows us a flat haze over the skyline, possibly a cross-development artefact that sure makes the rare daytime scenes dull. Aside from film-inspired sepia coloring, grain effects and motion blur in the Kong Mode fight sequences, the overall appearance of the game is a morass of dark blue-green, drawing on an apparently limited texture library.
The acoustic quality of the game is little better. If dynamic volume adjustment based on distance and directions on where to shoot or where to go are going to play any part in your game, you had better make sure they are accurate – not, “There’s just one more to find” when you have only found one lever to open the routinely-encountered doors, or, “look out, it’s on your right!” when the enemy is in fact gnawing your behind off. Characters voices are either loud as though they’re in your immediate area or quiet as though they’ve decided to swim for the mainland. Sure, they got the real talents (or very close facsimiles), but when they tell you “Go get another lever!” then scream “Where are you?!”, you’ll wish you could stuff some island leeches down their throats.
As for the music, audio accompaniment is kept to a dull, ambient roar. When there is music, it’s usually a woman singing strange choir ‘ooh’s and ‘ah’s when you take damage. While the effect packs a punch at first, what few variations there are on the theme are also too slight, and coupling this with your comrades crying out bloody murder whenever you take a scratch, the dramatics get old very quickly. Other music includes orchestral nonsense, mostly during the Kong portions, probably lifted from the movie soundtrack. While it’s good, it’s standard fare and not terribly memorable, on which grounds I will now conveniently gloss over it.
Import Friendly? Literacy Level: 0
We chose to cover the US version of King Kong, which is entirely in English.
+ Pros: easily accessible to fans of the movie, the game is moderately long, not truly difficult, and highly authentic. Good tie-ins to the official website where you can get codes for bonus unlockables, plus you can earn plenty of extras at percentage milestones.
- Cons: difficulty can come in the form of design defects – of which Kong possesses a veritable banana bunch. Routine, mundane tasks have you repeating your motions every five minutes. The visuals, in the Cube version at least, have lots of room for improvement.
Overall: Those who had been anticipating the film at the time and who may have even seen it by now may enjoy the obvious involvement of the Hollywood magic-makers in PJKK:TOGM. However, it’s more about the media here, a means to the end of pushing a product, and it shows – just don’t take the giant chest-pounding primate too seriously, and you’ll do fine
Written by Katie Montiminy.
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