Disaster Report: Skull Island: Rise of Kong (Switch)

Kong. The Eighth Wonder of the World.

 

For many years, the main thing King Kong had in common with the other seven wonders was that most people knew him as a part of history. While he got respect for being one of the first giant movie monsters and every now and then some director would come along to make him grab a woman and climb another skyscraper, he’d fade back to being mostly know as the headliner of a cinematic classic.

 

However, eventually, Kong got back in touch with an old friend to help reignite his career. In the 60s, Godzilla and Kong faced off in battle, Godzilla bringing his atomic breath and Kong his power of grabbing a really big tree and stuffing it in Godzilla’s mouth, but while this seemed like a mismatch, the rematch in 2021 lead to a revitalization of Kong even though he had to drop the King title to the more recognized King of the Monsters. Kong got his own film, co-starred with Godzilla in two of them, and as this modern push brought the big ape back into the public conscience, even his video game appearances seemed to be wisely handled. Attaching himself to popular games, he’d go to where the players could be found. Soldiers in Call of Duty titles and even the more realistic World of Tanks had to watch out for the appearance of the big ape and lizard in their multiplayer battles. Recent to the time of writing, Kong’s even got himself featured in the Fortnite battle royale so you can have him shoot guns at Batman, Darth Vader, and Snoop Dogg.

 

However, while they managed to take Kong and steep him in the present, they couldn’t get him away from one relic of the past… cheap licensed video game tie-ins. Rather than letting him show up just in popular titles as a cameo, he was given a game of his own, courtesy of GameMill Entertainment. To be fair to GameMill, despite the name conjuring images of some passionless automated assembly line for low quality games, they do sometimes end up publishing tolerable or even slightly enjoyable games like their Nickelodeon racers and fighters. To be fair to the customers who might see any kindness given to GameMill as an endorsement to give their products a chance, they also were behind the awful Goosebumps: The Game, the soulless trendchaser Pickleball Smash, and the repetitive and hollow Zombieland: Double Tap – Road Trip. GameMill does seem to churn out licensed tie-ins and sometimes it manages to give the games to a developer who manages to put something nice together, but with IguanaBee being rushed to make a Kong game with few people in general even working on the game, it was pretty much destiny that GameMill will deliver an all-time stinker with the action game Skull Island: Rise of Kong.

 

AN UNKONGVINCING START

So what is Skull Island: Rise of Kong, and why is it being featured in a review series about the worst games of all time?

 

Meant to serve as an origin story of sorts for Kong, we see his early days on Skull Island where he’s meant to grow into the kind of powerful titan that could one day tangle with the likes of Godzilla and Snoop Dogg. However, a gorilla running around an island beating up other giant monsters didn’t seem to provide enough emotional stakes, so when the game begins, you’re instead playing as his mother. After a rather serious narration to set up the dramatic angle, you find yourself controlling Mama Kong in a rather amusingly plain start. Standing upright and still in a random cave, you watch the game textures pop-in a little late before the tutorial begins. The game in general can often look fuzzy, blurry, and repeatedly impresses with how multiple objects on screen look bad in different ways. Muddy cliffs ooze as you approach them, not because of some intended effect, but because of a weird texture warping glitch looks like melting ice cream… although since this visual issue also arises in Pokemon Violet, it must just be some odd problem with Switch graphics rendering that I’ve only ever seen twice.

In a rather poor choice, Skull Island: Rise of Kong starts off by giving you all the abilities you’ll unlock over the course of the game and makes sure to teach them to you even though many of them won’t be available for hours. This isn’t an unprecedented game design choice, it’s meant to give you a small taste of what lies ahead before you slowly regain the abilities you got to play with at the start, but that implies that the abilities will be worthwhile and enjoyable to use once reclaimed. Here, you get to experience certain powers like a charged-up headbutt… that is too slow for the combat once you face anything that can put up a fight and mostly serves as a means of breaking specific giant red glowing rock walls in your path instead. You get a power where you slam the ground with your arms that can harm nearby enemies, but it leaves you vulnerable and it’s best instead used for breaking glowing red rock floors, although that’s not always necessary. Sometimes if you just walk on those floors Kong might fall through, which can help if the game is having detection issues with the ground pound despite that basically being its only purpose. One of the few abilities you will be happy to see again is a special jump where you crouch down and can then see a line indicating the arc of a large leap you can then take. Normally, you’ll find Skull Island is a dangerous place where sometimes the ground you need to jump to can cause you to slide off an edge to repeat a dull unopposed platforming section with no danger besides the falls and yet there are also many ledges you probably shouldn’t be able to jump onto you can climb up to with ease to skip annoying areas. The leap showing where you’ll land at least lets you aim the jumps better, especially with a camera that isn’t too keen on following you and sometimes causing jumps to be a mite tougher than they need to be.

 

The main thing about gradually regaining these abilities when you are a growing Kong is that, besides their use in breaking through barriers, the fighting isn’t really going to benefit from them. Almost as a trap, the game does allow you to level up Kong’s abilities with points earned from specific battles. Investing points is a great way to waste your rewards, there being actual increases to defense and strength you can purchase instead and even a passive healing factor that are much wiser than making your terrible headbutt a bit better. What’s worse, most of your chances to earn these points involves scouring the open areas you explore for the small battle arenas you get locked into until you’ve killed all the beasts inside, but the combat really won’t evolve from what you see with Mama Kong at the start. Execute your basic attack combo and maybe cap it off with the strong attack that can sometimes stun your foes and that’s quicker and more effective than trying to mix in riskier special moves with less reward for landing them.

Eventually, Mama Kong will complete her tutorial and find Daddy Kong facing off with a giant dinosaur, the terror of the island… Gaw. Gaw makes quick work of Baby Kong’s parents, the game making sure to portray the emotion of the moment by contorting the plasticene faces of the giant gorillas in ways that aren’t meant to look comical but end up a bit too absurd to take seriously.

 

Cut forward a few years to the Kong we know now an adult, having fought to survive for years, but he still carries on his mother’s spirit by standing stiffly and upright in a cave unceremoniously when you gain control of him.

Looking out the cave entrance you’ll see large cliffs, enormous trees, and perhaps think that maybe Kong is still a bit young, not quite the giant who can hold humans in the palm of his hand yet. But no, Skull Island is just proportioned so that Kong just looks a bit more like a tall gorilla. Sure, sometimes a palm tree looks a bit small beside him, but when you’re also finding yourself facing giant crabs with a camera so zoomed out that nothing looks gargantuan, you do start to feel a bit puny. Ferns look normal sized next to Kong when they must be the size of busses since Kong could hide in them if he felt like it, and sadly, it’s not just an appearance of bad sizing at play. Areas can be huge with not much going on in them, and in fact, while the game scatters a bunch of enemies around, there’s no point to stop and fight them unless you’re forced to in a battle arena. All it might lead to is unnecessary damage and all the enemies are fairly incapable of doing much but running behind you should you just keep running towards your next destination, leaving the most common activity in the game being to jump around large rock plateaus to reach higher places so you can then cross new rock plateaus.

 

Things get much worse though, because while the design is yawn-inducing and offers little of note to do, Skull Island: Rise of Kong will still have you contending with an unpredictable and impactful danger that you never know when it might strike. That being… the glitches.

 

LOSING KONGTROL

The name of this section wasn’t chosen just for the Kong pun. Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a game where you can literally lose all control of your character for no reason or have some of your ability to fight inexplicably stripped away.

 

The more dangerous of the two is thankfully the rarer one but the more baffling and unpredictable. Twice during my time with Skull Island: Rise of Kong I landed on a seemingly innocuous rock that was along the main path required for clearing the game, and suddenly, Kong was standing completely straight but refusing all orders. I could rotate the camera, but Kong would not move, he would not attack, he just stared forward blankly as if he was having flashbacks to standing in a cave as textures load in a bit late. Or perhaps the death of his parents, the game making sure you don’t forget that during some actual flashbacks since it can’t really find much of a story in fighting a bunch of animals otherwise. The first time this Kong freeze-up occured required a full reset of the game to cure, but the second actually lead to an unexpected savior in the form of some pollen releasing flowers that are meant to serve as dangers but rarely did much besides briefly harm you before you move on as if nothing happened. Here, the little damage freed Kong of the stupor that afflicted him for seemingly no reason. At times I would try to jump to places the game clearly didn’t want me to be and yet they were more forgiving than spots on the intended route through the game that sometimes wrested all control away from the player. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who dare speedrun this game find it fairly easy to get Kong places he shouldn’t be, although whether or not they fear the sometimes less functional main path is something I don’t yet know.

 

Skull Island: Rise of Kong does have a fairly frequent autosave and the option to make saves of your own much of the time, so losing control entirely could at least be seen as only a small setback… but loading a save is a danger all its own. See, after a death or load of a save, sometimes Kong’s ability to fight is thrown out the window. Normally your basic combo has a specific rhythm to it and yet you only need to mash the attack button to execute it effectively. If you’re unlucky, on a reload, you won’t execute the combo anymore, each press of the button cancelling the previous attack so unless you time it properly, Kong might just stand in place swinging his arms without ever even hitting his target. The heavy attack almost needs to be charged now since it won’t just activate normally on a button press, and some moves like a rolling tackle that is at least sort of useful to start a fight with instead are completely gone. Rather than doing his running attack, Kong jolts to a stop when you try. You can try and reload again, or maybe die to reset it, but it isn’t clear how to guarantee Kong will once again control in a normal way. At times, it might just be wise to run forward as far as you can with the busted controls to avoid having to bring the action to a stop repeatedly to fix things. Funnily enough, this does add extra stakes to the game. You don’t want to die because you might not even be able to fight properly when you respawn!

The game’s second area, Jungle Wetlands, makes avoiding respawns hard though, not because it is a difficult area per se, but because it was at this point the game started to really chug. Perhaps because it was more open than other areas or I hadn’t died or reloaded a save recently enough, as I ran through the wide barren marshes, the game was getting slower and slower, almost like I was playing an online game with an increasingly poor connection. Even though I had my attack combos available, there was a new issue where I would try to start attacking and the enemy would move between the time my attacks were input and when they were actually registered by the game. Jumping became difficult since leaping almost required pressing jump a full second before I’d normally want to, and ultimately I met my end when I was surrounded by raptors and couldn’t move quickly enough to avoid them getting in enough little hits. When I reloaded my save though, suddenly things were moving at regular speed again, possibly indicating the game was simply loading in far more than it could handle and was finally freed of the stress by having a chance to dump all that data it held onto for no reason. This only occurred for me in the one area, but at that point I had many reasons to repeatedly turn the game on and off to regain control or fix other issues.

 

HARDLY A KONGQUEROR

Your basic attack methods in Kong’s combat are mostly used for the dinosaurs and giant fauna around the island, some bigger foes taking more of a beating but also you can utilize a unique finishing move to off them and earn back some health. These can feature some animations that sound interesting like getting on the back of a crab and hammering your arms hard and fast or paying homage to Peter Jackon’s King Kong by pulling open a Carnotaurus’s mouth until it cracks… sorry, I meant Kernotavrs, which they call the T-Rex adjacent predator for some reason. In an all too expected twist you can sometimes see Kong fail to line these up properly, sometimes pulling on thin air that happens to break the Karnotavrs’s mouth or Kong and the monster will take a brief jaunt into the interior of a stone wall since you were bit too close to it before they return to normal as if they hadn’t just moved through solid matter.

You do have one more attack in your repertoire though, and it initially seems like a smart addition. Kong can rip up a boulder from the ground and hurl it, which can help when enemies are standing on the rock ledges you’ll be jumping to so often. If you get hit by an attack while holding the rock, you’ll drop it, and many of the larger enemies also have a stun attack that they can land on you easily if you’re trying to line up the rock throw while too close, making it easy for groups of beasts to surround you. Seems balanced, although those stuns are incredibly annoying and common to the point you wish you didn’t have to get in close to fight big enemies… and you don’t always need to.

 

The AI controlling the enemy monsters is not very intelligent, to the point you sometimes see giant crabs get stuck trying to walk through too small a space between trees or more importantly, most animals don’t know what to do if you take the high ground. Find a little rock to stand on, and the enemies will all rush over and stand right beside it, freezing in place as if they were Kong on an unassuming stone floor. After that, just keep pulling rocks up and chucking them and you can take out most any enemy in the game, the few that do have answers like pterosaurs or acid-spitting worms rarely necessary to kill, fairly weak to basic punches, and almost never impeding progress.

 

Most of the game’s bosses can actually be taken down with this strategy. Sometimes it’s a nice perch to stand on as you do your rock tossing, although the game’s second boss, which you might not be surprised to hear is a variation on the giant crabs that have been oft mentioned, actually instead just requires you to stand at a specific distance from it during your rock tossing so it tries and fails to hit you with its claws rather than running off. Even the final boss can be tackled with a relentless and thrill-free barrage of rocks, and it’s preferable to playing fair since otherwise you’ll probably keep getting stunned and have to run around the boss arena to gather healing plants instead. However, the game’s fourth boss has a diabolical trick, one more fiendish than most any other video game boss I’ve seen.

Queen Oyoq is a giant spider, boss of The Great Caverns, an already agonizingly long and twisty area where you’ll often want to pause to consult your map even though all you’re really doing is leaping around rocky platforms in a  dim featureless cave. By this point, a smart player will have invested in their defense a bit too, invalidating the weaker spider foes found in this area as they can no longer even deal damage to you. After a lot of lifeless wandering around, you plunge into Queen Oyoq’s layer, a small space where three tiny dead end halls meet at a central spot. Up above, a large netting of web serves as the ceiling, but through small holes you might spot the queen arachnid… who is dark purple so she’s not really visible in the dark black above. You’ll often find her not by actually seeing her, but by her firing globs of webbing down that sometimes stick to the floor and make it slow to walk on, and you’ll periodically need to run around the small lair to search for her since at times she almost seems to disappear.

 

To get her down so you can actually attack her, you need to have her in one of the dead ends and throw a rock up through the web to knock her to your level.

 

Problem 1: Queen Oyoq is constantly spawning baby spiders, some of these being the weak ones that shouldn’t harm you but they may block your attacks while the large ones that can stun you or wrap you in webbing attack.

Problem 2: Your rock is thrown at an odd arc, meaning if you don’t line up your throw right, you might miss the queen and then get attacked by those spiders, losing your window of opportunity.

Problem 3: If you try to take out the spider minions first, the queen will probably move on. If you do knock her down and run over to take advantage of the brief time she’ll be vulnerable, the large spider minions will still try to attack you as you do so and likely waste your time with more stuns.

Problem 4: Your rock throw is technically more of a “thing throw”, meaning that if there are tiny enemies nearby, you’ll grab them instead and toss them although they can’t knock the queen down. Remember those tiny spiders that don’t harm you anymore? They’re the exact right size to be picked up and you’ll often find yourself with a handful of arachnid since they won’t back off!

 

Repeat this agonizing process again and again, gradually whittling down the queen as best you can, and when her health bar is depleted, she’ll whip out her ultimate technique: crashing the game. For some unclear reason, after defeating Queen Oyoq, the game will crash. Well, you try the fight again, get her down to no health… and it crashes a second time. Oddly enough though, it seems third time is the charm, and not just for me specifically. Investigating this glitch online seems to indicate multiple people found it takes the third time for the death to stick and the game not to crash, although I did get a glitch afterwards where the notification for one of the restored abilities I got would not disappear from the screen until I restarted the game. However, it seems you are almost guaranteed to have to fight the game’s worst boss three times, and while it was a bit admirable they tried to make a boss fight with more substance than whaling away on your foe until they died, I felt no compunctions against doing the safe rock throwing trick in the dramatic showdown with Gaw at game’s end for fear it might have to be repeated multiple times as well. On the bright side, at least the throwing trick can be used on small creatures for some very strange looking posing, the animal often seeming a bit happy and content until they’re hurled towards their doom.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game’s efforts at optional content are not only not worth seeking out for fear it would involve playing Skull Island: Rise of Kong more, but they are pretty hollow rewards as well. Collectibles are scattered around the island, consisting of such utterly unfascinating objects such as the generic bow and dagger people would use to fight monsters, the generic armor they wore, and just a bowl for food. Sometimes it would be a skull of a creature, but even with little paragraphs of lore trying to dress things up, the collectibles were often an unfortunate find since you might not even realize you were going down an optional path and now you must do more jumping around and tedious combat back on the main path to continue.

 

There are far more battle arenas to find than required to get the actual worthwhile upgrades and they inherently involve more of the mindless and simplistic fighting to clear, the game’s enemy variety barely evolving beyond the starting area especially since the opposition mostly relies on the “crowd and stun” tactic. Considering some foes like the the red large crab (not the boss crab but also bigger than your standard giant crab, but not as big as the orange huge crab that can grab you in its claw in a way where you can even tell if Kong or the crab are the one getting hurt) seem to damage you without even clearly attacking at times, it’s best to bolt towards an area’s exit and not look back. Just make sure you don’t accidentally end up down the paths that serve as shortcuts to older areas, especially since some are one-way shortcuts so you’ll have to traverse multiple areas to get back to where you were if you think maybe this game was sending you back to older areas for a reason.

 

 

KONGCLUSION

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a constant downhill plummet as you not only discover glitches that hinder gameplay in new and impressive ways, but you gradually learn how shallow and unfulfilling the game is to play even when it works. Most of your combat options are basic when they’re functional and the new moves you get don’t gel well with how often enemies will leave you stunned during combat should you stand and fight, but effortless rock throwing can trivialize the more obnoxious fights at least. On the other hand, you can’t trust any ground to be safe to land on or if you’ll even be able to control Kong properly after loading a save or just playing the game for a while. A truly tremendous mishmash of conceptual failures and technical woes, you can’t even say they got Kong right since he feels tiny in this land where everything else is just as gigantic if not more so.

 

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is mostly a game about jumping around rock ledges and deciding if you want to suffer more time in combat when you encounter enemies or end up on the side paths with battle arenas. It’s that terrible case of a game where if it worked just fine there still wouldn’t be anything fun worth doing, mostly because the game’s only way of accounting for Kong’s might seems to be stunning you repeatedly. The only difficulty in jumping around areas is that you don’t always know if you can trust the camera during your jump or the ground you’re landing on. The most inspired part of this game, the Queen Oyoq fight, is also built horribly, from major considerations like how you even hurt her to simple things like dragging it on with the sticky webbing or her color matching the cave’s own darkness. The game isn’t even sure how to populate areas, often throwing enemies around hoping you’ll stop and fight for no reason to hide that if you’re not jumping around, you’re just running through obnoxiously huge and pointless open spaces.

Maybe you’ll perk up every now and then to laugh at Kong’s rubbery facial expressions and his fur that looks like its made of clay when it’s not blurring at even the slightest touch of a the camera stick, but even then you get the best of that unintentional goofiness at the start and the rest pales a bit in comparison. Skull Island: Rise of Kong can disappoint even in its ability to provide things so bad they’re funny, but it does do something quite well. In the films, Skull Island is meant to be a place so hostile that no one would want to visit it. Skull Island here is definitely an atrocious land to find yourself in, the wildlife terrifying in how boring they are to face, the terrain dull when it’s not somehow robbing you of control of your body, and death ends up more horrifying than ever since you can end up reviving wrong. No wonder Kong is considered the 8th wonder of the world if he managed to survive such a terrible origin story.