It’s one thing when a good game puts out a bad DLC (well all remember the Oblivion horse armour fiasco), but it’s quite another when an already insultingly bad game puts out an equally insulting batch of extras. No one likes salt being rubbed into their already gaping wounds, or being kicked when they’re down. It’s been a little while, but something came along recently that does just that.
Skull Island: Rise of Kong, is an awesomely terrible game on so many levels. It’s a total mess that my colleague has gone over with a fine-toothed comb here, check it out if you’re after something car-crash-fascinating. Basically, it’s a licensed King Kong game that struggles to even do the bare minimum. A big dinosaur called Gaw kills Mummy and Daddy Kong, and then you play as a grown-up Baby Kong who has to take revenge.
Mechanically it’s a simplistic brawler that has you face off against the various denizens of Skull Island while navigating some of the worst level design to ever be sold on Steam. It also looks like a game from 20 years ago, and not in a fun nostalgia-y way, in a rushed-out claptrap kind of way. There’s no defending the way this game looks. It’s not an artistic choice or a deliberate retro aesthetic, it just looks bad.
Insult to Injury
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the desecration of a beloved IP, the hideous graphics, and the truly awful gameplay, Rise of Kong also released with some of the most egregious DLC I’ve ever seen. Now, games like Diablo 4, with their “mega-transactions” make me angry, but I struggle to feel the same way about Rise of Kong, even though I probably should. The extra content on offer is so pathetic, that all I can do is laugh. The Diablo stuff angers me because I know it works. If however, you (like me) willingly purchase the “Rise of Kong Colossal Pack,” then maybe you’re just not ready for the responsibility of financial freedom.
The first big feature trumpeted on the Steam page is the addition of eight “exclusive” (what does that even mean?) film grain filters. You know, those things any game with a camera mode will throw in for free, as an afterthought. You’ll also get an albino white skin fo your Kong, as well as more “exclusive” behind-the-scenes footage of the game’s development. I can’t imagine anyone would be that interested frankly. Maybe if you’re a King Kong fanatic, but even then I think you’d be too busy sending the developers hate mail to sit down and find out how the game was made.
It’s amazing to think that anyone sat down and decided that film grain and a white gorilla were somehow worth flogging as extras. They hardly qualify as stocking fillers! It’s one of the most slapdash cash grabs I’ve ever seen, and throwing around words like “exclusive” and “unique” does nothing to hide that fact.
The only real feature of any note is a boss rush mode, but in a game as bad as this, that’s hardly worth celebrating and does nothing to justify the $15 price tag. The game is painfully underweight already, without parts of it being cut out and sold back at a vastly inflated price. There are so many better things on Steam that you can and should spend that money on.
Hopefully, no one has actually bought this DLC. There is only one review on the store page at the time of writing (not mine), which is a good sign. It’s pretty clear that the developers had to come up with something in a hurry, so they just chucked together some filters, and some footage they had lying around and called it a day. It’s a display of supreme laziness that should not be rewarded.