Skull Island: Rise of Kong Review

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a third-person action-adventure videogame developed by IguanaBee Studios and published by GameMill Entertainment. Orphaned at a young age after Kong’s family is killed by a dinosaur (more tyrranid than tyrannosaurus) named Gaw, Kong vows revenge for his parents — by sitting on his butt eating fruit until he’s reminded of his vows as an adult when he hears Gaw roar in the distance. You play as Kong as he travels from his home to Gaw’s location, beating up everything he sees and learning the same skills his dad had in the tutorial, but with added perks through skill trees.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is based on a novel written for the 2005 remake of King Kong about the origins of the ape himself, titled Kong: King of Skull Island, which is a sequel to a rewrite of the 1932 novelisation of the original film, King Kong. This makes Skull Island: Rise of Kong a videogame based on an origin story from the sequel of a reworked novel, of the remake, and a cult-classic film. What makes it even more convoluted is that Skull Island: Rise of Kong and Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie are canonically in the same universe because of this.

However, you wouldn’t be able to squeeze out the narrative for the life of you, besides the fragmented cutscenes with the worst audio I’ve ever heard. In the first opening sequence, I thought it was a design choice to make the exposition sound like it’s being played from an old recording due to the game being based in the late 1800s. The audio of a softly speaking voice actor (so soft you can’t hear what they’re saying) with the sound technicians leaving popped Ps in the recording like amateurs is off-putting. The audio levels — and the quality of them — are a major issue of Skull Island: Rise of Kong. Sound effects like running (where the sound effect loops), jumping (and landing), and fighting are all muffled, which makes everything else around Kong, like other animals and the environment, sound like they’re up to 11.

Where Kong’s audio is done correctly (as I bet it was the first thing the team worked on) is his roar. His roar has multiple uses in the game. It’s used to locate where the objective is (your only map is a .jpeg on a menu screen) lit up by coloured fireworks, to knock back enemies in combat, and when the gorilla face on the HUD is filled,  enter a “rage” mode that buffs Kong with added perks.

Once the meter depletes, you revert back to slap fighting interchanged with rolling or a game of “Chase me while I spam throw rocks at your face”; your only two choices in battle, including in the boss fights. You regain health by collecting purple plants scattered around the map and performing finisher moves on dazed or damaged (glowing red) enemies, where you can get back some of your health by pressing the grab trigger. In my playthrough, it only worked when I spammed the trigger. And on the large crab enemies — where you need to get behind them to activate the move — it looks like Kong is grabbing a handful of them.

On that note, the animations and visuals of Skull Island: Rise of Kong are broken… in a sense. Where the development team has presented something somewhat decent, it’s followed by a mix of unintentional humour and broken assets. Starting with the animation, Kong himself can look pretty good — for the art style — in his mean/fighting stance, but in his idle stance, the term “the wheel is turning, but the hamster’s dead” fits nicely. Another example is the end of a boss fight where Kong does some kick-ass moves to bring down a creature twice his size, which is followed by a still-shot dream sequence of Kong’s family where Daddy Kong reassures Baby Kong by (what is meant to be a head pat) grabbing the back of Kong’s head. One flick of the wrist would end the game before it began.

When it comes to enemy animations, they move on scripted pathways — stopping for a second, then moving again. They look too video-gamey to be realistic. In combat, they telegraph their attacks long enough to dodge or block them, a design choice that is only implemented for games catered to children.

That being said, it's safe to say that Skull Island: Rise of Kong is just another rushed children’s game for parents (who just want to occupy their kids during the holidays) to buy for their darling angels. If the colourful textures and graphics don’t sell it enough, the game doesn’t show blood. Another selling point is that the game looks like a moving comic book. Everything from Kong, plants, and the scenery has a black outline, and the vibrant colour palettes of each map lights up what is a dull environment of randomly placed junk like rocks, plants, and poorly rendered textures. Many times, I would be running, and the game was desperately trying to load the textures, and removing fog from assets. Though, the third map (which I don’t think anyone will get to out of pure boredom) is designed to hide smaller mobs in thick brush, so you have to navigate the jungle floor and sky for ambushes. It might have been the most fun I had playing besides making monkey sounds when I started to get bored an hour in.

And here lies the biggest issue of Skull Island: Rise of Kong: it’s not engaging players properly. Sure, Kong wants revenge (everyone loves a revenge story), but why should I care? Without a sense of purpose that both Kong and the player have, both sympathy and determination have to be reached to keep players wanting more. Without that, you get called “the worst game of 2023”. Which begs the question, didn’t another game get called that just a few months ago?