Have you all seen this King Kong game that’s been floating around? My first exposure to it was this cutscene that was being shared on Twitter. I’m going to be entirely honest with you: I love playing good games and this year has absolutely no shortage of them but I put aside everything I was doing yesterday in order to check out Skull Island: Rise of Kong after seeing that cutscene. There’s something about shockingly bad games that really piques my interest and that brief, 15-second, scene had it all–a horrifically modeled and textured giant gorilla, camera work straight out of Spider-man 3, and what appeared to be a single jpeg of a dinosaur attacking in place of a real animation.
So I paid $37 legal American tender to purchase Skull Island: Rise of Kong on my PS5 on the eve of the launch of Spider-Man 2 so you didn’t have to. I’ll admit, nearly $40 felt a little steep for a game I most certainly knew was going to be the worst game I’ve played in a long time, but I didn’t do it for me: I did it for you. After about three hours of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, I can definitively say that you should not buy this game under any circumstances, not even for a joke.
When I started the game, I was hoping that it would be as bad as that initial cutscene I saw consistently throughout, but that’s usually not the case with bad games. More often than not, a peak bad moment like that where everything wrong with the game comes together for a brief horrific crescendo goes viral while the rest of the game is just pretty dull without being that funny. Rise of Kong is essentially the same as your Aliens: Colonial Marines or Balan Wonderworld: it’s momentarily hysterical but then after the funny cutscene ends, you’re just left playing a bad game and the joke is kind of on you.
Kong in Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
Skull Island: Rise of Kong starts with some narration about how we’re about to hear the tale of Kong and, well, his rise…on Skull Island–riveting I know. It starts with a prequel chapter were you play as Kong’s mom who goes out looking for baby Kong and his dad. It’s just a tutorial where you’re introduced to the sloppy combat, terrible visuals, and absolutely frustrating level design. It’s the sort of game that has controls from like 2006–an action platformer with a three-button combo that you’re meant to mash to get through the entire game.
Eventually, you do unlock new combat abilities, but they’re pretty much all consistently not worth it to use since they have big wind-up times that leave you open to incoming attacks from enemies that can drain your health surprisingly fast. Part of that comes from the fact that enemies will surround you and all attack at once, meaning it’s virtually impossible to get out of any given combat encounter unscathed.
You have a parry, apparently, the devs played Sekiro and were feeling inspired by the Headless Ape fight, but it’s just a shoulder check that you’re supposed to use when an enemy is winding up for an attack and a little glint of light appears in their eyes. This hardly ever works properly. It seems like you need to be facing the enemy head-on in order to parry them, but because the shoulder check shoots you forward, I missed them pretty consistently. Not that parrying is at all helpful, it just stuns an enemy for a second or two which you can achieve much easier by hitting them with a heavy attack.
Listen, let me summarize what I’m trying to say here: the combat is bad. But, you knew that, you’re seeing this footage. I don’t think either of us came into this journey thinking it would be anything other than that, but the question is is it funny? The simple answer is no, the combat generally isn’t funny. In fact, it’s pretty frustrating. Like I said, enemies can pretty rapidly drain your health and if you get swarmed, you can end up stun-locked as each one attacks in turn and you’ll just die without any way to have prevented it. You do have a block, but there’s a delay between hitting the button and Kong actually blocking and you can’t block while being actively hit by enemies so it’s totally worthless.
To get back to the story, Kong’s mom runs around Skull Island in search of Kong and his dad and she eventually finds them being attacked by a big dinosaur named Gaw. Gaw kills Daddy Kong with a single tail whip and then you have a supposed-to-lose boss fight with it. Once you lose, Gaw kills you to and then baby Kong runs away. Before he goes, Gaw lets out a roar and–wait a second–that’s the dinosaur jpeg from the cutscene that started this whole thing. As it turns out, the image from the cutscene that went viral on Twitter wasn’t being used in place of the dinosaur in the scene attacking Kong, it was a one-second flashback to Kong’s most traumatic moment. In fact, there are several times when that image flashes throughout the game. So that’s one mystery solved.
After that, we see a montage of Kong growing up and then one day, he gets woken up from hanging out under a tree by the distant roar of Gaw and he just gets up to go find and kill him. Or maybe he’s running away? Honestly, it’s not super clear, Kong doesn’t talk in the game and the narrator doesn’t give us any hints.
An image of King Kong fighting a dinosaur in Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
Once he gets up, you start the first full level and, to be honest this is the moment when everything falls apart. Up until this point, the game was just an ugly b-game that got by on its truly hysterical cutscenes, but those are about to be few and far between as you discover the real villain of Skull Island: Rise of Kong: the level design. When you open the pause menu, you can see the map of the level and each one is a twisting maze full of paths that give you no indication of where to go. The map screen says to use your roar to figure out where to go but doesn’t tell you how to roar and when you do figure it out, it doesn’t do anything. You see these white lines emanating from areas in the distance across the level, but with how winding all the passages are, there’s no clear direction on how to get to them.
I found myself aimlessly wandering around, fighting off the legions of dinosaurs and giant crabs that litter the island. As I said, the combat is just bad and the game makes you do it every 20 seconds. There’s a skill tree that threatens you with more abilities every time you open the menu but there was nothing that would make this game into anything worth spending time on so I just ran past all the enemies whenever I could. The tough thing is, the game doesn’t give you any indication of where to go so you just wander around in search of something–anything.
I mentioned before how ugly the game is and I think that’s clear based on the cutscenes I’ve shown, but look at what happens to the visuals in combat. Look at what’s happening to the environments as you run around. It’s like you’re playing an oil painting that’s slowly melting all around you. It’s so disorienting and when paired with the terrible level design, there’s just nothing to this game. Eventually, I made it through the first level and beat the first boss, a giant worm that attacks you for no reason before you kill it and move on. You do so little damage to the bosses in this game, it’s so pathetic and makes each fight take like seven full minutes, but I was never able to beat a boss on my first try so it was like half an hour before I could just move on.
I finally called it quits on level three–I think out of five? The level design was just too much for me to deal with, I was lost, and the third level is completely packed to the brim full of dinosaur enemies that attack really fast and deal huge damage so I was dying pretty consistently, but hey, at least Kong does the t-rex kill from the movie. Iconic.
I couldn’t take any more of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, I’m sorry. I meant to beat the entire game and report back to you, but I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t get to see the cutscene that started this entire adventure and I have no idea how the person who captured it made it that far, it’s truly a bad game on all fronts. It’s kind of funny, I mean, these cutscenes do need to be seen to be believed, but they’re not worth the $40 I paid to get in.
The game is published by a company called GameMill, which already is a bad sign, you really don’t want your games to come from a mill, and taking a look at their other titles, I imagine you’ll find similarly offensive design choices in the rest of their work. They did make Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl which I’ve heard is actually pretty solid, but other than that, I’m not sure what sort of quality you can expect from Zhu Zhu Pets the game or Disney: Frozen: Olaf’s Quest. I’ve seen a lot of people comparing this to Gollum from earlier this year, but at least Skull Island: Rise of Kong didn’t have the gall to pay what I imagine is thousands of dollars to have its trailer shoved in my face at the Game Awards or Opening Night Live or whatever, so I think it’s got that over Gollum.
If you were wondering, Kong does eventually kill Gaw the dinosaur in an act of brutal revenge on par with the likes of The Last of Us Part 2 which I know because the trophies say as much. I will say that I do appreciate that Gaw and the rest of the dinos have feathers. It’s like the devs said, “Listen, we can make a truly awful game, but I’ll be dammed if I draw the line at historically inaccurate dinosaurs.”
Combat in Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
P.S. As I was writing this, a report came out from the Verge regarding the development of Rise of Kong. According to devs from IguanaBee, the team behind the game, the publisher GameMill required the studio to churn out Rise of Kong in just a single year and kept many details of the project secret from them. I think when looking at the totality of the game, it’s clear that many of its issues come from a lack of time and funding being given to the developers. It’s not their fault that they were placed under such strict deadlines, so don’t take this video as me ragging on them. They did the best they could with what they were given and reportedly were crunching since February which is 100% the fault of the publisher. Anyway, I felt like that additional context was worth adding since I didn’t want to come across like I was trashing the devs themselves.