Ubisoft’s new Action Game – Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie presents a quandary to most gamers’ minds. The logical left sphere of the brain should automatically shift into a worried frame of mind, because this is a movie tie-in, and movie tie-ins are all rubbish, aren’t they?

At the same time, the more emotive right side of your brain takes note of one important fact: This is a game that features a big monkey. Not just any big monkey, but the granddaddy of all big monkeys. Monkeys automatically make games better – don’t they?

Well, actually, both of the above statements are utter rubbish. There have been good movie tie-ins (Chronicles Of Riddick, Goldeneye) and bad Monkey Games (Eye Toy: Monkey Madness and Ape Academy) to boot. King Kong’s not a game that totally focuses on its big monkey – indeed, for a great deal of the game you won’t be playing as the big shaggy chap at all – but it is a game that wastes no time whatsoever in immersing you in its movie feel. It’s that cinema-style immersion that sells Kong, and while like most cinema experiences it feels a bit short, it’s one heck of a ride while it lasts.

If you’re not familiar with the basic plot of King Kong (this author refuses to use the game’s full title, if only because if I have to type “Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie” more than twice, the review will run to about twenty pages, and will need its own leather-bound appendices), there’s an island, a movie within a movie, and a big ape. It’s actually not that much more complicated than that, although the plot of the 1930′s original was a good forty or so years ahead of its time, whether or not you accept the idea that it’s an allegory for race relations or not.

The first thing you’ll have to come to grips with in Kong is that you don’t start out as a tiny ape being shown the ropes (or vines, presumably) by a kindly elder ape. This isn’t a Disney flick, after all. Instead, you play as Jack Driscoll, a screenwriter-slash-IndianaJonesALike who travels to Skull Island with a motley crew of, well, film-makers. Think obsessive director (acted superbly within the game by Jack Black), screaming starlet and a cast of extras and technical types, and you’re on good ground. Except that you’re not on good ground – you’re on spooky Skull Island, sans Scooby Doo.

The second thing you’ll have to bring yourself to accept is the fact that Kong features no on-screen counters, inventories or displays of any kind. It’s a deliberate step to make it seem more film-like, and it’s one that works superbly well. You can always see what Jack’s carrying at any time, and an inventory count is only a button press away – although you will grow somewhat tired of hearing the same sound bites for ammo counts over and over again. This even extends to health bars – in a very Halo/Call Of Duty 2 style moment, when you’re hurt you’ll see the screen go red and blurry. You can hack on, in hopes of scoring a victory, or just go and hide somewhere until you heal up. Sure, it’s patently ridiculous – but then this kind of thing happens in the movies all the damn time.

Jack’s basic role within the game isn’t much removed from most modern FPS games – you’ve got to fight off giant insects, prehistoric monsters and everything else that a place like Skull Island throws at you. In one sense, it’s a remarkable feat of style over substance – at its core, you’ll be burning the same grass and wood structures over and over again, throwing the same burning spears and carefully stockpiling the incredibly meagre stores of actual ammunition you’re given in rote repetition. Where it works so well is that it’s been superbly paced and directed, and is accompanied by some truly jaw dropping visuals – and hopefully the Xbox 360 version has done even more, although we won’t know that in the Australian market until next March.

Then there’s the big fella, Kong himself. You’ll actually have to wait a fair while to control Kong – and it’s a great tension builder that makes you anxiously race through each section with your anticipation growing all the time – but once you do, you’re moved out of the first person world and given control of a hulking hairy behemoth of destruction. He’s not clever, and you don’t need to know how to do a dragon punch to control him, but the foes that you were hiding only seconds before from are now just minor annoyances to be swatted away with the back of a hirsute hand.

The change in pace and the change in your power are refreshing indeed, but there’s no slacking in terms of visual splendor or jaw dropping action sequences. There aren’t many games that combine a cracking visual engine along with actually appealing design, but Kong should long stand as one of the best examples from this generation.

So, what’s wrong with Kong? Well, like most Hollywood blockbuster movies, it is more a triumph of style over substance, and in this case the lack of substance comes in the form of a quite short running time – you should crack the game open in under ten hours easily on your first run-through. There are additional objectives and better stuff to unlock as you go along, so there’s some incentive to replay it – beyond the fact that it’s one of the simplest and yet most captivating games to come along for a long while – but there’s no denying that on the games scale, this feels a little lightweight. It’s probably fairer to judge it on the movie side of things – for the equivalent of seven or so movie tickets, you’re getting a similar amount of play content. As such, it’s fair to say that Kong will probably pop up in the second-hand bins of your favorite local software emporium rather quicker than many of this year’s biggest hits do – but at the same time it’s a game that everyone should play. It’s also a title that anyone making a movie tie-in should study very carefully, as it solidly creates a new standard for such titles. If all movie tie-ins are as fun as Kong, we’re in for a bright gaming future indeed.