What do you get when you cross the hottest movie director in Hollywood (via New Zealand) with one of the most respected and creative game designers in the business? Throw in a 40-foot-tall protagonist, and you’ve got Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the new game based on the new movie from the now-lauded director of the Lord of the Rings series. Peter Jackson’s name alone tells you the movie will be an epic and spectacular remake of the original, but it’s his collaboration with game auteur Michel Ancel (Rayman, Beyond Good & Evil) that elevates Ubisoft’s title for Xbox and Xbox 360 to the upper echelons of movie/game tie-ins.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong the game is not only one of – if not the – finest games based on a movie license ever made, it’s a very progressive game in and of itself, eschewing so many gaming clichés while immersing you very deeply in the adventure at hand. Broken into two distinct playable parts – as male lead Jack Driscoll and the titular simian himself – King Kong defies simple descriptions. The missions playing as Jack are first-person, but they’re hardly conventional shooter types. The third-person (third-beast?) Kong missions feel almost like Prince of Persia mixed with a street brawler. Except you’re punching out prehistoric T-Rexs instead of drug dealers. At every turn, King Kong is innovative and different, but obviously intended to be played by a wide, casual audience. This doesn’t mean it’s been “dumbed down” for the casual gamers. Quite the contrary. Kong is what we in the biz like to call “a thinking-man’s shooter,” but one geared toward a more non-gaming audience as opposed to the more jaded, hardcore crowd. Both camps should have a great time with it.

Gorilla My Dreams

The game follows the basic narrative of the movie, but skips pretty quickly to the action. After an opening cutscene that’s very similar to the movie’s trailer, you begin playing as Jack as he tries to land a boat on Skull Island. He’s accompanied by unscrupulous movie director Carl Denham (Jack Black), down-on-her-luck actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), and the crew of the Venture, led by a tough sailor named Hayes (Evan Parke). All of the characters are modeled after and voiced by the real actors.

If you’ve seen the original 1933 movie, then you know the basic story (and if you have absolutely no idea what King Kong is about, then please skip this paragraph) – people go to mysterious island to make a movie about strange events; natives attack and kidnap beautiful blonde white lady and offer her as sacrifice; huge monkey shows up, takes her away, falls in love with her, and battles other big monsters; people capture huge monkey and take him to New York where he breaks loose, goes berserk, and climbs the Empire State Building. The end.

The game spends the vast majority of its play time on Skull Island, where as Jack, you’re trying to find a way off the island and to safety. There is evidence of an ancient civilization, as well as current inhabitants. But they’re not your biggest concern. Yet. How about those 30-foot-long poisonous centipedes?

King Kong isn’t a game about running around and shooting stuff. Guns and ammo are very limited, introduced into the world via air drops from a seaplane. Spears, bones, and sharp sticks are available for you to pick up and throw, but they’re not much defense against the giant crabs, dinosaurs, and man-sized bats that populate the island. Like I said, you have to think your way past a lot of the obstacles, and guns are often your last resort.
Becoming immersed in the role of Jack is made much easier by the lack of a health bar or crosshairs or any form of interface. If you want to know how much ammo you have left, push the B button and Jack will tell you. If you’re hurt, you’ll know it through pulsing sounds, but without health bonuses to pick up, you just have to wait it out and you’ll heal.

The immersive gameplay and the complete absorption into the world is the soul of the game, though. What’s on the surface is pure spectacle. Kong the game presents big dramatic moments with the same sort of effect that the movie does (or at least that we expect it will). The first time you see Kong, as he approaches a tied-up Ann on the sacrificial altar, is so impressive that you can almost smell his banana breath. The effect is similar when you encounter other giant creatures for the first time; the awe you feel is what you expect the characters would really feel in the same situations.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Once Kong has arrived on the scene, it’s not long before you’ll actually be playing as him, and this is where the game really gets to be worth the price of admission. The Kong levels are played in third-person, and don’t involve any weapons other than the occasional tree trunk you pick up as a club. They convey a massive sense of scale, and the levels are surprisingly fast as you guide Kong through long, loping pursuits in the jungle, swinging from trees and running along vine-covered walls, Prince of Persia style. Peter Jackson’s Kong moves much more like a giant gorilla than a guy in a gorilla suit, but when he fights giant Tyrannosauruses (or V-Rexs, as Jackson has renamed them), he throws punches and grapples like an ultimate fighting champion. His moves list may be limited, but the battles are epic and make you understand why Kong’s body is so scarred and gnarled.

Monkey Shines

We played the game on both Xbox and Xbox 360 for this review. Since the content is exactly the same for the two – including cool extras like a black-and-white filter for that old-film feel and an alternate ending that we won’t ruin for you – the only differences between the two versions are graphical. We could go on all day about some of the tear-inducing visuals in the 360 version, especially in the lush jungle sequences, but look at the screens and see for yourself. What’s really impressive is how good the graphics are on the original Xbox. If the 360 was not in the picture, we’d put Kong’s Xbox graphics up there with some of the best we’ve seen on the console.

But graphics aren’t everything, and gameplay is what really counts at the end of the day. Playing through Kong is one of the freshest gaming experiences we’ve had this year. It’s obvious that Jackson and designer Michel Ancel thought out every detail so that the game would be fun, exciting, and surprising at every turn – and be a game that you experience as a movie you’re actually involved in. There’s a weird parallel there to the movie’s Jack Black character, who is trying to film amidst the mayhem of Skull Island, that shouldn’t be lost on anyone. And if you’re like us, you’ll be even more hungry to experience the movie after you’ve played through this extraordinary game.

ON XBOX 360

+ Blurs the line between the way a movie entertains you and the way a game does.

+ Gorgeous graphics, even on the less powerful Xbox.

- New York level is too short.

? Why didn’t they let you play as Ann? She has some interesting experiences.

9.0