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dkirschner's Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie (360)

[December 8, 2011 03:20:54 PM]

Having heard forever that this one is totally worth playing, I finally bought it (for the second time) to play. I bought a PC version a year ago but it didn't work with Vista and I could never patch it or anything, so grabbed the 360 version a couple weeks ago. The great thing about this is that it's a film game that is indeed worth playing. The only other good one I can think of is the Chronicles of Riddick game, so it's an elite club.

King Kong is short and sweet. It follows the movie pretty closely from what I can remember and all the movie cast provides voiceovers. Jack Black is the best voice for sure, and the Ann character has such a blood-curdling scream. You play as the Jack character. It's funny though, I don't think he's EVER shown because the game is in first-person. So all the other characters, yeah, I recognize them from the movie, but MY character I have no clue what he looks like because I don't remember from the movie!

There are a few really cool things about this game. Even though it's from 2005, it's pretty. The environments look good, and Kong and the other big dinosaurs especially are epic looking. I read an article once that was talking about the horrible facial animations for the human characters, Ann in particular, and that one was spot on. I don't even think their lips move when they talk. It doesn't take away from anything though. The game is from a first-person perspective and you play as Jack AND King Kong. The King Kong sections involve big monster fights and ape-platforming, swinging from branches and such. Playing as Kong is awesome. The controls make it feel just like you're maneuvering a giant gorilla. It slows down and feels powerful. You can go into "Fury Mode" by mashing Y a lot. Kong beats his chest, roars, and then deals a ton of extra damage. The game is completely linear, and the Kong sections really benefit from this because it makes the platforming fast and purposeful. See, Kong is always doing something specific, chasing a dinosaur, running away with Ann, or whatever, so he has these short and intense platforming sequences.

I thought the game would be more an FPS, but it's more action-adventure from a first-person view than a shooter. Your main weapons won't be guns, but spears. Guns are kind of like your "oh shit" button. So there are spears laying around everywhere. There is also fire everywhere. If you dip the spear in fire it becomes a flame-tipped spear, which does more damage and can be used to ignite grass. This is important because apparently on Skull Island grass and knee-height shrubbery is impossible to walk through. It must be burned away. I wouldn't call any segments of the game puzzles, but they could have been. Maybe they're puzzle-like. Sometimes you need to burn grass, but there's no fire in sight, so you've got to set out with a spear and find fire. There are these gates all around too that require handles to turn to open the gate, but the handles will be missing, so you've got to set out to find the handles. It usually takes just a minute to spot them and another minute to get it, but sometimes there's a small sequence of things to do in order to get the handle.

Enemies can all be killed with spears, except the giant V-Rexes, which can only be killed by Kong. It's kind of unrealistic to kill a big dinosaur with two flaming spears, but at least # of spears to kill varies in proportion to the difficulty of the dinosaur. There are a couple other weird things, like why are there crates of ammo and guns on Skull Island? Who hung ammo crates up by ropes? Why are some of the fires located way up high in ridiculously stupid places that no one would ever look and serve no purpose (I'm looking at you, Millipede level).

That's about it. Fun game. I think it took me maybe 7 hours. It's divided up into really short chunks, usually probably in the 10 minute range, but some as short as walking through a tunnel or watching a cut scene for like 1 minute.