  Have a breath mint already! |
From four-foot Hobbits to 25-foot gorillas, Peter Jackson knows a thing or two about creating fantastical critters.
And being an avid video gamer, the Lord Of The Rings director handpicked talented Rayman and Beyond Good & Evil creator Michel Ancel to helm the video-game adaptation of Jackson's much-anticipated feature film, King Kong.
The result is a game that's consistently good but only packs a handful of the "Wow!' moments that made BG&E such a gem.
You play the bulk of the game as 1930s Hollywood leading man Jack Driscoll (played by Adrien Brody in the movie, who also lends his voice to the game), stranded on the mysterious and lost-in-time Skull Island with ingenue Ann Barrow (Naomi Watts) and filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black).
Ubisoft chose a cinematic approach for Jack's first-person segments, with no heads-up display cluttering the screen. Instead, your field of vision pulses red when Jack is hurt, and pressing a button will have him vocally confirm how many bullets he has left. It's a great way of immersing you in the experience without reminding you you're playing a game.
Controlling Kong himself, which you do for about a quarter of the game's short run time, is also a huge kick. When you're playing as the super-sized simian, the view changes to a fixed third-person perspective as Kong scampers through the jungle (or, at the very end of the game, the streets of New York), clambering along cliffs, swinging from rocky outcroppings and clobbering the crap out the prehistoric beasties that threaten his new girlfriend, Ann.
It's great stuff, but once the Kong segments are over, you're back to throwing spears at velociraptors, clearing thorny barriers with fire and searching for levers to open giant wooden gates as Jack. Which is generally fun, but the sameness of it may make you feel restless.
Where King Kong shines is in the moments where you're confronting Skull Island's enormous and intelligent monsters, either as Jack (the giant T-Rex can't be harmed by gunfire, so white-knuckle evasion is the name of the game) or as Kong (where you battle thunder lizards and giant bats in vicious knock-down, drag-out rumbles.)
The game's art direction is also outstanding, borrowing heavily, we're told, from the upcoming film. But unlike the video-game adaptations of Jackson's Lord Of The Rings movies, there's no film footage in this game at all, outside of a brief snippet of the trailer shown to set the stage at the beginning.
Which is great if you don't want anything spoiled for the movie's Dec. 14 release, but given how seamlessly gameplay was merged with footage in EA's LOTR titles, it's a little disappointing that Ubisoft didn't go the same route.
And there's one final catch: While the visuals are good on all the platforms, they're frequently stunning on the Xbox 360. (Ditto for an absolute top-of-the-line PC, though the less intuitive controls essentially negate the graphical advantage.)
The Xbox 360 version of Kong is definitely a four-star experience compared to the less powerful game machines' offerings, so consider that if you were lucky enough to score the new console.
Either way, it's worth taking a swing through the jungles of Peter Jackson's King Kong. But it may not be quite enough to keep you happy until you see the film.
For that you'll need bananas. Lots of bananas.
BOTTOM LINE
A well-done, great-looking action game that falters by being too short and a little lacking in variety. But add an extra half-star to the score if you have an Xbox 360.
WHAM! Rating: |
7 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
Teen |
Official Web Site: |
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