Months before the release date of the movie Godzilla vs Kong was known, I got to review that Peter Jackson movie about King Kong that came out quite well compared to RKO’s classic and iconic 1933 feature film.
Personally, I was surprised by how well that 2005 film is preserved, saving certain scenes due to the special effects on the creatures of the island, being widely surpassed today, especially in the scene of the stampede a la El Rey. León, which is where the seams are most visible. But saving that detail, it caused him to give another chance to the video game Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie by Ubisoft Montpellier.
One of the first intergenerational licenses
This game, which we will refer to from now on as King Kong to dry, was released the same year as the homonymous film, being, in turn, one of those that were part of the great Xbox 360 launch catalog at the end of 2005 .
It was also an intergenerational game, as it was also released for the first Xbox along with other consoles of the time, such as PlayStation 2 and GameCube, closing the quota for Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS and PSP laptops, apart from the eternal PC.
What did all this mean? That, for example, the potential of the new Microsoft console should not be exploited, of course. Or that the video game did not follow the plot of the film by heart, by taking certain licenses in many scenes to make sense of when transferring its story to a video game. It is something that we usually see often in this class of productions, although it is also true that in the case of Ubisoft the core was respected enough, although varying (or modifying) the order of some scenes, which was shocking if we had the very recent film .
Ironically, the beginning of the video game starts with entire scenes from the film itself, but summed up to the beast, in just a couple of minutes, to start the action just when you set foot on the island. It should be remembered that this in the feature film took more than half an hour to produce, which shows that the game was more to the point. In fact, here we are faced with monsters shortly after arriving.
As we have said, Ubisoft took certain licenses when directing the rhythm of the game, surprising to see how those giant bugs that the group faced in the middle of the film here took the reins from the beginning, with crabs, scorpions or even a kind of gargoyle to deal with using firearms or makeshift spears . Curiously, the natives took a few chapters to appear, but their role was anecdotal here.
One thing they did share film and game was how twisted and burdensome Carl Denham could be, played by Jack Black , an unscrupulous director who kept the truth from the crew until the cake was discovered. To make matters worse, in one of the first sections we had to escort him and he could be killed by velociraptors. And we can’t let it die, unfortunately .
The best King Kong video game to date
He was not the only character from the film recreated in the video game, as Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) were also present, the latter being the one we controlled for much of the adventure. The striking thing is that the scenes with Jack, as a first-person shooter with slight pieces of puzzles, were skipped with a few controlling Kong himself, betting on the action with a most cinematographic camera in the third person.
Today he limps in both facets due to how limited it was at the playable level, surprising, for example, that with Jack there was no button to jump or that he could only carry a firearm other than a spear. With Kong, in addition, there were parts that were too scripted with the jumps over walls or branches and it was not that he stood out in the fighting, being a bit rough with the blows.
It was an overly linear game, on the other hand. It was impossible to get lost and to top it off (or luckily, depending on how you look at it) it had no collectibles. Visually effective for the time, yes, especially for the movements of Kong or the larger dinosaurs, which impressed their own, stood out precisely for that variety of situations offered by Jack and the imposing Kong, with two totally different styles of play inspired by the movie until its end in New York.
With Jack we were very vulnerable, something that the character himself reflected with increasingly pronounced breathing after moments of tension . It was necessary to dose the ammunition and take advantage, above all, of those corpses with improvised bone spears, since from there we could extract them in an unlimited way, unlike the trunks with three spears nailed in a very few way.
This King Kong game offered, in turn, sections where we had to use the element of fire in our favor, burning part of the environment in order to advance or contain the bugs, use baits as a distraction or get levers to activate the mechanisms of large doors.
For a game about a movie, it is striking how much Ubisoft took care of some aspects, the most striking being the behavior of the dinosaurs. If they found the carcasses of critters or other dinosaurs that we had killed, they would go up to them to eat them, which was also a great distraction.
It did not matter that it was not a copy of the film , scene by scene, by offering other types of situations that perfectly complemented the essence that Peter Jackson wanted to convey. Without going any further, he knew how to take advantage of the environment to create tension when we faced for the first time a velociraptor and a giant centipede at the same time, or a group of these dinosaurs with spears, fire and other types of environmental elements. The only bad thing was having to suffer Carl.
King Kong offered a short but intense experience , and the possibility of unlocking an alternate ending to the movie that we all have so much in mind since the 1933 original was very welcome. Instead of the tragic ending of the Empire State Building, we could save Kong by controlling a fighter plane to eliminate those who attacked this beast, turning off the spotlights that illuminated it. After this, Kong returned to his happy island to continue being the king.
For the rest, a more than worthy game knowing that it is a license and in which there was a slight replayable component from the extras section, necessary to unlock precisely that alternative ending based on the points obtained in certain sections … or using tricks. When will the next King Kong video game be? That since 2005 another one has been playing, right?
If you want to replay it, know that it is backwards compatible on Xbox One / Series.
