Reviews// King Kong (Xbox 360)

There is another side to the game of course, the advertising proclaims the idea that you can "Play as Man, Play as Kong" and for once, the adverts don't lie. You can indeed step into the paws of a 25 foot gorilla, swing through the jungle and beat up dinosaurs. The Kong sequences are played in a third person perspective giving you a good look at the big ape. The principal idea behind the Kong session is to swing, climb and run around your environment, bashing the hell out of anything that gets in your way. A secondary objective is to stop anything else from doing the same thing to Ann, for whom you have the big ape hots.

You'll notice that I haven't said much about the part of the game where Kong gets to New York. Well, that's because the game doesn't do much with that part of the movie. How could it? Kong is in chains, breaks loose, breaks things, climbs the Empire State Building and gets shot off. Almost all of the game is set on Skull Island, limiting the scope of how you can play to the above killing, doors and fire. The Jack sections vanish once the game reaches the Big Apple too.

But that's the game, it's basically the same if you play it on the Xbox 360 or on the PS2. What you want to know about is how does the thing look? How does it sound? Do we have a high-definition masterpiece on our hands? Well, sort of. The graphics are great, the feel of Skull Island is there, you are creeped out by the tunnels, you stare in awe at the majestic landscapes, you run in fear from the dinosaurs. The sound is excellent, you get a real feeling of unease as you progress through the nastier areas of Skull Island, you feel the dinosaurs roar, you feel the earth tremble as Kong runs around. It's all good, but almost the same thing is shown on the PS2 version. Sure the resolution isn't as good on PS2 and the textures have a bit more depth to them on the 360, but unless you're using a high-def TV or a decent computer monitor, you aren't going to be able to tell the difference while playing the game.

I have the fun advantage of a projector TV and 5.1 surround sound system at home and seeing King Kong on a 16:9 ratio screen with a six foot diagonal while listening to dinosaurs roar at you from all around is one of the best ways to spend your Sunday afternoons. However that size of screen and level of audio makes Fantavision a totally engrossing game, Kong isn't anything special in that regard. In the office, a nice 21" monitor capable of 1600x1200 provides a decent high-def display to play the game on. Again, the higher resolution textures make the game look great here as well, but you can tell that King Kong is a multi-platform release. There are a couple of points in the game where you have to share the screen with a herd of stampeding Brontosauruses, it looks fantastic when you can see it, but fogging limits you to seeing about four or five of the huge beasts at a time, a limitation probably introduced for the benefit of other platforms, that could have been removed from the 360 version. In other places the pre-rendered distant scenery is shown to you in three-mile vistas. The Xbox 360 version of Kong suffers from being a multi-platform release and, to be honest, I think for the near future, so will most non-exclusive games in the 360's library.

So getting back to the initial question of this review; is Kong a good game in its own right? Yes, I think it is. It's enjoyable for the set-pieces, some of which have a great sense of imagination. However, the footwork to get to the action gets quite tedious after a while.

SPOnG rating: B-

King Kong is not the 800-pound gorilla that Ubisoft would like it to be this Christmas, but it will keep you entertained while you play it. Even though the game is fun, it's no high-def masterpiece, it's let down by the fact that it spans so many platforms and a general purpose game engine can only handle so much detail. This could have been a stand-out example of next-gen gaming, but, in the end, as the original movie said so succinctly, "It was beauty killed the beast."