Skull Island: Rise of Kong Review

Here’s the thing about King Kong: He is not just an ape, he’s a giant ape. It’s his defining feature in the 1933 movie that birthed him and the ultimate cause of his tragic demise. Picking up people, climbing skyscrapers, fighting dinosaurs — being huge is King Kong’s whole deal. Skull Island: Rise of Kong is bad for a lot of reasons, but the main one is it’s a game that lets you play as an iconically large gorilla and somehow manages to make him feel exceedingly average. Rise of Kong portrays King Kong in the most bland way possible, and then it matches that mediocrity for everything else around him.

Rise of Kong lets you experience how King Kong became King Kong, which was apparently by beating a lot of things to death and getting really angry while doing it. After swearing revenge on the giant raptor that killed his parents like some sort of gorilla Batman, you’ll punch your way through each of Skull Island’s five levels, all of which are as massive as they are boring. There is absolutely nothing here you haven’t seen before in a hundred melee-focused action games. Combat gives Kong a light and heavy attack, a dodge roll, and a block, and while you’ll earn some special moves along the way, there is never any reason to use them. You’ll encounter a small handful of different enemy creatures — dinosaurs, crabs, worms that pop out of the ground and spit acid — but the only variation when it comes to fighting them is when to dodge an incoming attack.

Killing the boss at the end of each level unlocks new, but not particularly interesting, abilities for Kong, like a ground-pounding punch that hurts enemies and can break through certain rocks, or a heavy attack that can stun enemies and break through certain other rocks. Each new move also comes with its own small skill tree, where you can choose one set of attributes from three to power up. These provide some nominal upgrades, like earning life back from hitting an enemy or providing armor while you’re charging up a big strike.

But no matter what you upgrade or unlock, every fight is pretty much the same: Hammer the light attack button to perform a three-hit combo, then use Kong’s only cool ability, a shoulder charge that shoots him forward a short distance and can temporarily stun enemies, to interrupt the attack of whatever you’re fighting. When the enemy takes enough damage, hit another button to perform a finishing move on it, which restores some of the health you lost to the many other enemies attacking you in the back during this process. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

There are other little elements, such as an overly familiar rage ability you charge by damaging enemies that powers up all your attacks, but they’re only good for breaking up your combo or finishing a fight slightly faster. Rise of Kong also removes any challenge combat might present by placing health-restoring flowers pretty much everywhere, including in the middle of and immediately following any large-scale fight you might get into. You’re never required to think about how an enemy attacks and use a specific move to deal with it, or to change up tactics based on how many or which kinds of enemies are on the field. You play a giant ape who routinely kills literal dinosaurs, and Rise of Kong manages to make that prospect dull and lifeless.

All those well-placed health items are at least helpful, as they make it much easier to just run past most enemies. That’s something you’ll probably want to do once you realize that there are hundreds of them and that they mostly just exist to waste your time. Skill points to make Kong stronger are only dished out at special Ascension Events, which are fights in specific arenas that are closed off until you finish them. They come in two flavors: Kill all the enemies in the arena, or climb around and destroy the nests of flying dinosaurs. Once you’re done with the objective, you get a couple of points, and occasionally you earn enough to actually invest them into one of your meager upgrades. That means the only fights that actually serve to improve Kong are boss fights and Ascension Events, and the many, many other enemies are just pointless filler.

The Ascension Events at least try to change things up by throwing different combinations of enemies at you, occasionally even featuring a new, slightly tougher creature you haven’t seen before. But the repetitive combat means they all shake out exactly the same way, requiring you to spend one second identifying the two or three combat animations the enemies have and then avoid the ones that can actually hurt you. There are five total Ascension Events in each level, and they’re mostly pretty hard to miss, but like the rest of combat, they never feel satisfying or even particularly necessary to complete. Blow past one and you’ll miss out on a few points to unlock skills you don’t really need, so who cares.

The boss fights stand out at least a little from standard battles, with each including its own signature mechanic that shakes things up. For instance, a big sandworm boss throws rocks out of the earth when it emerges to attack you, and you can then bait it into smacking its head into those rocks, stunning it. You don’t need to do that — you can just stand there and wail on the thing, stepping back before it does one of its three attacks — but at least these fights attempt to engage your brain more than Rise of Kong’s bog-standard battles. The bosses are still derivative, simplistic, and unimaginative, but they’re definitely better than the low bar set by everything else.

Kong is a gorilla, so of course, climbing and jumping make up the other half of Skull Island, with levels that consist of big areas where fights happen and big areas where you’ll do some simplistic platforming. Like combat, the platforming here is the most pedestrian version of ideas you’ve seen before. You’ll jump over a few gaps, some of which require you to get a running start, and climb on some vines, occasionally moving laterally instead of vertically. Exciting, I know.

Movement is more inoffensive than annoying, but it’s worsened by level design that is absolutely unhinged. Each of Rise of Kong’s five levels is huge, a meandering and winding series of pathways that branch, loop, and cut back on one another. Your only goal is to get from one side of the biome to the other, but Skull Island is constantly trying to confuse you along the way, with an in-game map that only serves to preview how lost you’re about to get. My assumption is that there may have been a version of Rise of Kong where tracking down Ascension Events, collectibles, and smart paths back and forth through levels was part of a much larger focus on exploration than in there is in the final game — one that would have made better use of Kong’s roar ability to highlight points of interest for you to find on your own. As usual, though, that idea is executed only in its thinnest and most simplistic form. Instead, you just get a confusing tangle of a level and your main challenge is to avoid accidentally making big circles back to earlier areas of the map, sometimes sucking up tens of minutes for no good reason.

All of these elements, from platforming to combat, boss fights to skill allocation, are marred by Rise of Kong’s many technical issues. Bugs abound, and despite the mercifully short campaign taking me only about five hours altogether, there were points when it appeared to soft-lock and become impossible to finish at all. Kong got stuck in platforms, fell through waterfalls, and disappeared behind objects. One boss froze up after 30 seconds of fighting and never moved again, standing perfectly still while I three-hit combo’d him into the ground. Enemies sometimes wouldn’t spawn correctly during Ascension Events, a problem that could only be solved by loading an earlier save and hoping it worked correctly on another go. One time, all the dinosaurs that needed to be killed in an Ascension Event turned and ran away, disappearing inside a big rock at the far end of the arena. Midway through, all the skill upgrades I had unlocked spontaneously re-locked themselves and the points I’d spent on them just disappeared. Luckily, none of those upgrades actually mattered.

And it must be said that Rise of Kong is an ugly game, with dated graphics and a mostly flat art style of gray rock walls and repetitive jungle trees. The whole thing has a cartoonish vibe approximating a comic book or almost cel-shaded look, but it feels more like an attempt to mask its blocky, low-res character designs rather than an artistic choice. Cutscenes frequently include animations of creatures moving around like they’ve been picked up and dropped somewhere else, and one ridiculous flashback moment features a square still image of the final boss just pasted poorly on top of the existing background. There are also numerous points where you’ll see trees not quite attached to the ground or rocks haphazardly and obviously duplicated and pasted on top of each other. It all looks sloppy and rushed, providing more evidence of a game that was created without a lot of care.