Reviews// King Kong (Xbox 360)

The Skull Island levels of Kong play almost like a survival horror game, with giant insects and dinosaurs popping up here and there to make your life interesting and force you to conserve ammo. Guns and ammo are dropped by the captain of the Venture as he over-flys the island in a sea plane looking for a place to land in order to pick you up. However, when you run out of bullets, there are always spears or bone fragments to chuck at your foes. Speaking of spears, primitive though they seem, you have to use them in many places to progress through the game. You learn early on in the game that most of the inhabitants of Skull Island will very happily eat you, the good thing is they will also eat each other at the drop of a corpse.

Here in lies one of the game's most often repeated tricks. Grab a spear, skewer an oversized grub, large flying insect or swimming thing that happens to be handy in times of need, wait until you are about to be attacked by nasties and throw the spear to the other side of the current area. Your opponents will scamper after the tasty little morsel, leaving you (a tasty large morsel) to walk happily past. A slight deviation from this routine is afforded by flying creatures that can attack you quite handily, but shoot them from the air and ground-based creepy-crawlies will eat their corpses to give you a chance to get past or to shoot them in turn from a safe distance. This technique comes in handy in one of the game's set piece encounters with a large dinosaur.

The puzzle elements come from opening doors, original no? Well, yes, sort of. You don't find keys, or door passes in this game, what you need is a stick. Yes, a stick. You know, straight(ish) bit of wood, brown of colour, grows on trees. It turns out that most of the doors on Skull Island need two people to open them, from the outside. Fortunately you are usually accompanied by some of the crew and passengers of the Venture. Your companions are quite bright and will help you open doors, fight monsters and pass weapons to you when you have no bullets left. To open doors, you must turn two large wooden pillars, one at either side of the door. In order to accomplish this feat you will need a handle embedded in each pillar to push against - hence the stick. Finding the sticks is usually a matter of finding another piece of wood that looks like the door pillars and grabbing the handle from there.

Usually the handles are attached to pieces of wood that are hidden inside bushes. These bushes are impossible to pass through, even though they look less substantial than your average garden hedge. So how do you get the handle? By using your spear of course! Simply set light to your spear in a handy nearby fire and you can then set light to the impassable bushes, thus rendering them passable. The funny thing about this tactic is that the bone fragments you can pick up also burn quite readily and can be used for the same purpose, also the stick you are after is not affected by your arson episodes. Fire can also be used to kill enemies who are lurking in the bushes, which don't seem to hinder the bad guys one bit. If you don't have a fire nearby to light your spears with, look around, there may be a wall-mounted skull-torch you can upset to burn away the bushes instead.

As far as the puzzling goes, that's about it. Distract bad guys, kill bad guys, burn bushes and open doors with sticks. No exploring either, like I said, there are no dead ends. So you merrily follow the path, canyon or tunnel to the next area and perform one or more of the same tasks. So much for the Jack sequences.