Peter Jackson's King Kong
Posted December 14, 2005
Michel Ancel's stylish action-adventure Beyond Good and Evil may not have been as widely appreciated as it
deserved, but the few people who sought it out were deeply impressed. Among them was director Peter Jackson, who was inspired to bring Ancel and his team on-board to translate his remake of King Kong onto just about every conceivable platform in the charted universe. Although the resulting game is somewhat flawed, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie takes a deeply cinematic approach that's unique in an industry prone to churning out cookie-cutter, formulaic adaptations.
Gameplay:
The overwhelming majority of King Kong unfolds from the perspective of writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), one of the survivors of the ragtag crew that embarked on a disastrous film expedition to Skull Island in the early '30s. In an attempt to make the game as cinematic an experience as possible, the usual heads-up display is gone. There's no reticule, no health meter, no inventory, and no map, although some of those can optionally be added with a few button presses. Their absence is compensated for very naturally. Jack can't carry all that much -- just one firearm and one melee weapon -- so a full inventory list is unnecessary, and the way he counts his ammunition as he reloads is surprisingly effective. As is the case with Call of Duty 2, the toll of damage is indicated by the screen turning red, and if Jack has a chance to recover, that tint gradually fades away. If not...dead. King Kong goes to such lengths to not look like a video game that not even so much as Jack's forearm or whatever gun he's toting around appear on-screen unless he's preparing to attack.
The fact that Jack wields a gun from a first-person perspective for so much of King Kong probably makes it sound like an FPS, but that description doesn't paint the most accurate picture of its gameplay. One of the aspects of this game that differentiates it from so many other first-person
shooters is the 'food chain' system. If Jack is surrounded by scavengers, he can stab a dragonfly, a fish, or an oversized maggot with a sharp bone or a spear, chuck it dozens of feet away, and dupe the creatures into chasing after that so he can make a clean getaway. The system's progressive, so tossing a worm-spear can attract an oversized bat's attention, and then a larger dinosaur will be distracted as he starts chomping on the bat. Jack can find guns and ammo in crates throughout the game, but there's too limited a supply to mindlessly run-and-gun, so taking advantage of the food chain is necessary.
There's also a heavier emphasis on puzzles in King Kong than in most FPSes, although they're fairly simplistic, usually revolving around Jack finding some way to torch a stretch of thorny brush blocking his path (and sometimes engulfing carnivorous dinos in the process). Although most first person shooters have long-since ditched the dreaded technique of searching for keys to unlock doors, King Kong returns to this tactic by having Jack seek out levers to open the mammoth wooden gates throughout the game. They're usually not that hard to find, thankfully; there's rarely any variation in the puzzles, and the levers are almost always blocked by thorny brush, so it's easier to look for brush to burn than the lever itself.
One of the most frequently cited gripes about King Kong is its short length. If gaming forums are any indication (and aren't they always?), most players seem to be able to tear through the entire adventure in the space of six hours. It took me a little longer than that, but the brevity didn't really bother me since the tedium of playing as Jack made even seven hours or so seem interminable. The selection of monsters is disappointingly slight -- by the seven hundredth millipede, I was pretty desperate for a change in the line-up, but nearly all of the creatures Jack encounters can be counted on one hand. When Jack's attacked and the screen starts flashing red, that's pretty much it; it's so
disorienting that it's often borderline-impossible to figure out where the attacks are coming from and to be able to do anything about it. I very quickly got sick of the pattern of running around a level, fending off millipedes, finding a torch, burning the brush surrounding a lever, and slo-o-owly opening doors, a formula that describes virtually every moment of the game when Jack's on-screen. The Jack levels seemed considerably more entertaining in the last few hours of the game when he's pitted against more dinosaurs and has to find craftier ways to fend them off.
The gameplay is livened up by the handful of sections where players take the reins as Kong. Apparently the mindset at Ubisoft Montpelier was to have as few of these stretches as possible so that when the game shifts from Jack's first-person perspective to the ape's third-person, it'll feel more special. The Kong controls are simplistic but extremely fun -- the game does a fantastic job of simulating the heft of a 25-foot ape as he swings around or wipes out a half-dozen villagers (plus a hut or two) with just a single swipe of his arm. I can see why Michel Ancel and company opted not to have all of King Kong take place from the ape's perspective -- these moments are fun while they last, but they're not meaty enough to build an entire game around, and they can also be a little problematic. The camera is more-or-less fixed in pre-specified locations, which got to be a headache at times when playing as Kong; sometimes I'd wind up with something blocking my field of vision, or I'd be attacking a V-Rex from behind and would have an awfully tough time figuring out if the dino was within arm's reach or not. The fact that the button to leap and climb only works in certain spots makes these portions of the game feel somewhat mechanical as well.
One of the things that sets King Kong apart from the rest of the movie-adaptation lot is how heavily scripted it is. The interaction with the different characters in the game and the cinematic way the story unfolds is great...when it works. Although things progress without a hitch the vast majority of the time, if something's knocked off-balance, the game has a difficult time recovering. Hit any gaming message board and you'll find laundry lists of these hiccups, but there are a couple of different ones I encountered. In one battle as Kong, a dinosaur didn't head to its intended destination, so Ann was chucking lit spears off-screen, and Kong was fixated on some unseen point. The limited range of the camera wouldn't let me even see where the dino was, but it was apparently well out of harm's way. Eventually, I realized I needed to quit, and after restarting from my last save, a second try went completely according to plan. The end of one short stage requires chatting with Ann, who says she'll swim to Jack momentarily. I backtracked too far, and when Ann was attacked by a sea monster that's supposed to trigger the start of
the next level, the game instead decided to make me replay the entire stage again from the beginning. King Kong really needed more rigorous testing -- I've read a report where someone had caught himself in a loop where Jack would immediately die at the start of one level, and innocuously reloading my ammo once completely locked up the system, causing me to lose a couple of levels of progress. It'd probably be a good idea to both save often and to maintain separate save files.
I admire the skill and talent that went into fleshing out this video game adaptation of Peter Jackson's King Kong, but there can be an awfully big gulf between "admiration" and "fun". The first half of the game feels like work, and if I'd rented this along with a stack of other games, I'm sure I'd have given up on King Kong almost immediately. The last few hours genuinely are a good time, but I'm not sure the payoff's enough to warrant suffering through the first half of the game. That, coupled with the fact that most players should be able to breeze through King Kong in its entirety on a Saturday afternoon, leaves it better suited to a rental than a $59.99 purchase; neither the additional unlockables nor the gameplay are compelling enough for me to want to give this well-crafted but ultimately unsatisfying game a second spin.
Graphics:
Many of the multiplatform titles available at launch for the 360 left a bad taste in gamers' mouths, scarcely looking any different from their counterparts on the four-year-old Xbox. Even though King Kong is debuting on...what, thirty or forty different consoles?...a passing glance is all you need for it to be clear that this is indeed an Xbox 360 title. The jungle environments that comprise the majority of the game look fantastic, richly detailed in design and sporting some very high resolution textures. Admittedly, some of the textures (particularly the ground) look fuzzy close-up, and elements like the dry, thorny brush are flat and unconvincing. That can't be said about the particle and lighting effects; the way light streams into holes peppered throughout a dank cave and the way waterfalls cascade, to rattle off a couple of examples, are extremely impressive.
Since so much of the game takes place on Skull Island, it comes as little surprise that that's where most of the developers' attention was directed; although
I enjoyed the gameplay in closing moments in New York, graphically, they fail to impress in quite the same way. Another complaint is that as uniformly great as the dinosaurs and mighty Kong himself look, the human character models can't quite escape that last generation feel. The frame rate has a tendency to get kind of choppy, and Ubisoft has admitted in the press that the 360 version can be too dark at times on standard definition televisions, although I didn't run into any problems on my HDTV. Despite a handful of easily tolerated flaws, King Kong looks better than I'd ever have thought possible for a game debuting on so many different platforms at once, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Ubisoft Montpelier can accomplish when developing purely for a next-generation console.
Audio:
Having so much of the actual cast in tow gives the game even more of a cinematic feel, with Naomi Watts, Jack Black, and Adrien Brody, among others, contributing the voices for their characters. Voice acting can be tough for even the most seasoned actor to pull off, but they all do a solid job here. The orchestral score is somewhat unmemorable (I've heard the same gripe made about the movie) but is used to good effect. What really impresses is the way the game ekes the most out of a Dolby Digital 5.1 setup. There's a tremendous amount of bass, particularly Kong's thunderous roar and the seismic boom accompanying each brontosaurus step. The ambiance of the jungle is incredibly immersive, with the rustling brush and chittering creatures that are audible in every direction making me feel almost as if I'm the one frantically darting through some sort of forgotten savage land. An exceptional effort.
Conclusion:
Although King Kong is a technically impressive marvel, the sheer amount of repetition in its first half is insufferable even with the game's anemic six hour length. King Kong is redeemed in its last few hours, but a game this short with such limited replay value is really best suited for a rental. Rent It.
deserved, but the few people who sought it out were deeply impressed. Among them was director Peter Jackson, who was inspired to bring Ancel and his team on-board to translate his remake of King Kong onto just about every conceivable platform in the charted universe. Although the resulting game is somewhat flawed, Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie takes a deeply cinematic approach that's unique in an industry prone to churning out cookie-cutter, formulaic adaptations.Gameplay:
The overwhelming majority of King Kong unfolds from the perspective of writer Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), one of the survivors of the ragtag crew that embarked on a disastrous film expedition to Skull Island in the early '30s. In an attempt to make the game as cinematic an experience as possible, the usual heads-up display is gone. There's no reticule, no health meter, no inventory, and no map, although some of those can optionally be added with a few button presses. Their absence is compensated for very naturally. Jack can't carry all that much -- just one firearm and one melee weapon -- so a full inventory list is unnecessary, and the way he counts his ammunition as he reloads is surprisingly effective. As is the case with Call of Duty 2, the toll of damage is indicated by the screen turning red, and if Jack has a chance to recover, that tint gradually fades away. If not...dead. King Kong goes to such lengths to not look like a video game that not even so much as Jack's forearm or whatever gun he's toting around appear on-screen unless he's preparing to attack.
The fact that Jack wields a gun from a first-person perspective for so much of King Kong probably makes it sound like an FPS, but that description doesn't paint the most accurate picture of its gameplay. One of the aspects of this game that differentiates it from so many other first-person
shooters is the 'food chain' system. If Jack is surrounded by scavengers, he can stab a dragonfly, a fish, or an oversized maggot with a sharp bone or a spear, chuck it dozens of feet away, and dupe the creatures into chasing after that so he can make a clean getaway. The system's progressive, so tossing a worm-spear can attract an oversized bat's attention, and then a larger dinosaur will be distracted as he starts chomping on the bat. Jack can find guns and ammo in crates throughout the game, but there's too limited a supply to mindlessly run-and-gun, so taking advantage of the food chain is necessary.
There's also a heavier emphasis on puzzles in King Kong than in most FPSes, although they're fairly simplistic, usually revolving around Jack finding some way to torch a stretch of thorny brush blocking his path (and sometimes engulfing carnivorous dinos in the process). Although most first person shooters have long-since ditched the dreaded technique of searching for keys to unlock doors, King Kong returns to this tactic by having Jack seek out levers to open the mammoth wooden gates throughout the game. They're usually not that hard to find, thankfully; there's rarely any variation in the puzzles, and the levers are almost always blocked by thorny brush, so it's easier to look for brush to burn than the lever itself.
One of the most frequently cited gripes about King Kong is its short length. If gaming forums are any indication (and aren't they always?), most players seem to be able to tear through the entire adventure in the space of six hours. It took me a little longer than that, but the brevity didn't really bother me since the tedium of playing as Jack made even seven hours or so seem interminable. The selection of monsters is disappointingly slight -- by the seven hundredth millipede, I was pretty desperate for a change in the line-up, but nearly all of the creatures Jack encounters can be counted on one hand. When Jack's attacked and the screen starts flashing red, that's pretty much it; it's so
disorienting that it's often borderline-impossible to figure out where the attacks are coming from and to be able to do anything about it. I very quickly got sick of the pattern of running around a level, fending off millipedes, finding a torch, burning the brush surrounding a lever, and slo-o-owly opening doors, a formula that describes virtually every moment of the game when Jack's on-screen. The Jack levels seemed considerably more entertaining in the last few hours of the game when he's pitted against more dinosaurs and has to find craftier ways to fend them off.
The gameplay is livened up by the handful of sections where players take the reins as Kong. Apparently the mindset at Ubisoft Montpelier was to have as few of these stretches as possible so that when the game shifts from Jack's first-person perspective to the ape's third-person, it'll feel more special. The Kong controls are simplistic but extremely fun -- the game does a fantastic job of simulating the heft of a 25-foot ape as he swings around or wipes out a half-dozen villagers (plus a hut or two) with just a single swipe of his arm. I can see why Michel Ancel and company opted not to have all of King Kong take place from the ape's perspective -- these moments are fun while they last, but they're not meaty enough to build an entire game around, and they can also be a little problematic. The camera is more-or-less fixed in pre-specified locations, which got to be a headache at times when playing as Kong; sometimes I'd wind up with something blocking my field of vision, or I'd be attacking a V-Rex from behind and would have an awfully tough time figuring out if the dino was within arm's reach or not. The fact that the button to leap and climb only works in certain spots makes these portions of the game feel somewhat mechanical as well.
One of the things that sets King Kong apart from the rest of the movie-adaptation lot is how heavily scripted it is. The interaction with the different characters in the game and the cinematic way the story unfolds is great...when it works. Although things progress without a hitch the vast majority of the time, if something's knocked off-balance, the game has a difficult time recovering. Hit any gaming message board and you'll find laundry lists of these hiccups, but there are a couple of different ones I encountered. In one battle as Kong, a dinosaur didn't head to its intended destination, so Ann was chucking lit spears off-screen, and Kong was fixated on some unseen point. The limited range of the camera wouldn't let me even see where the dino was, but it was apparently well out of harm's way. Eventually, I realized I needed to quit, and after restarting from my last save, a second try went completely according to plan. The end of one short stage requires chatting with Ann, who says she'll swim to Jack momentarily. I backtracked too far, and when Ann was attacked by a sea monster that's supposed to trigger the start of
the next level, the game instead decided to make me replay the entire stage again from the beginning. King Kong really needed more rigorous testing -- I've read a report where someone had caught himself in a loop where Jack would immediately die at the start of one level, and innocuously reloading my ammo once completely locked up the system, causing me to lose a couple of levels of progress. It'd probably be a good idea to both save often and to maintain separate save files.
I admire the skill and talent that went into fleshing out this video game adaptation of Peter Jackson's King Kong, but there can be an awfully big gulf between "admiration" and "fun". The first half of the game feels like work, and if I'd rented this along with a stack of other games, I'm sure I'd have given up on King Kong almost immediately. The last few hours genuinely are a good time, but I'm not sure the payoff's enough to warrant suffering through the first half of the game. That, coupled with the fact that most players should be able to breeze through King Kong in its entirety on a Saturday afternoon, leaves it better suited to a rental than a $59.99 purchase; neither the additional unlockables nor the gameplay are compelling enough for me to want to give this well-crafted but ultimately unsatisfying game a second spin.
Graphics:
Many of the multiplatform titles available at launch for the 360 left a bad taste in gamers' mouths, scarcely looking any different from their counterparts on the four-year-old Xbox. Even though King Kong is debuting on...what, thirty or forty different consoles?...a passing glance is all you need for it to be clear that this is indeed an Xbox 360 title. The jungle environments that comprise the majority of the game look fantastic, richly detailed in design and sporting some very high resolution textures. Admittedly, some of the textures (particularly the ground) look fuzzy close-up, and elements like the dry, thorny brush are flat and unconvincing. That can't be said about the particle and lighting effects; the way light streams into holes peppered throughout a dank cave and the way waterfalls cascade, to rattle off a couple of examples, are extremely impressive.
Since so much of the game takes place on Skull Island, it comes as little surprise that that's where most of the developers' attention was directed; although
I enjoyed the gameplay in closing moments in New York, graphically, they fail to impress in quite the same way. Another complaint is that as uniformly great as the dinosaurs and mighty Kong himself look, the human character models can't quite escape that last generation feel. The frame rate has a tendency to get kind of choppy, and Ubisoft has admitted in the press that the 360 version can be too dark at times on standard definition televisions, although I didn't run into any problems on my HDTV. Despite a handful of easily tolerated flaws, King Kong looks better than I'd ever have thought possible for a game debuting on so many different platforms at once, and I'm looking forward to seeing what Ubisoft Montpelier can accomplish when developing purely for a next-generation console.Audio:
Having so much of the actual cast in tow gives the game even more of a cinematic feel, with Naomi Watts, Jack Black, and Adrien Brody, among others, contributing the voices for their characters. Voice acting can be tough for even the most seasoned actor to pull off, but they all do a solid job here. The orchestral score is somewhat unmemorable (I've heard the same gripe made about the movie) but is used to good effect. What really impresses is the way the game ekes the most out of a Dolby Digital 5.1 setup. There's a tremendous amount of bass, particularly Kong's thunderous roar and the seismic boom accompanying each brontosaurus step. The ambiance of the jungle is incredibly immersive, with the rustling brush and chittering creatures that are audible in every direction making me feel almost as if I'm the one frantically darting through some sort of forgotten savage land. An exceptional effort.
Conclusion:
Although King Kong is a technically impressive marvel, the sheer amount of repetition in its first half is insufferable even with the game's anemic six hour length. King Kong is redeemed in its last few hours, but a game this short with such limited replay value is really best suited for a rental. Rent It.