King Kong Preview

If you’re any kind of fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you know the infamous director behind the King Kong movie. Peter Jackson himself along with Wingnut Films and his WETA studio are behind this ambitious project. But oh, what a surprise! A seemingly popular upcoming movie is getting a direct videogame adaptation! Now it’s time for us all to think this is already a doomed project.

But should we really be so quick to think so? It certainly wouldn’t be unjustified to feel that way since almost all movie-based videogames have turned out to be utter crap in our gaming lifetimes, but this might finally be a fresh exception! When you think about movie-based games that were highly successful, most gamers have games like GoldenEye 007 immediately come to mind. Well, based on most critics’ recent feelings, this just may be the best upcoming movie-based game to date! Why? It’s simple, while it does maintain many of the important elements of the movie, it doesn’t exactly try to mirror everything, while offering a sense of freshness to the overall experience!

In this game, you will take control of both a man by the name of Jack Driscoll and the mighty gorilla himself King Kong! But as the game starts out, Driscoll is your goto guy. When the game begins, yourself as Driscoll and a group of his friends are lost in a land that time has seemingly forgot. This dreaded territory is known as Skull Island. For those of you who are actually familiar with the past King Kong movies, you would know Skull Island is a fictitious location in which all kinds of wild species live freely. Whether that might be velociraptors, T-Rexes, giant gorillas (go figure!), millipedes, or centipedes, Skull Island is home to many different fauna that will certainly give you run for your life! There are even ancient tribal clans that worship these very beasts and you have to look out for them too!

One of the first events that you will witness playing this game is the fact that you’re personally involved in a tribe’s sacrifice. No, you’re not actually the victim of it, it’s the poor blonde woman that is tied to a simple wooden contraption. King Kong himself eventually arrives to consummate this sacrifice, only to your hearing the blood curdling screams of the unfortunate female. After showing off his “massiveness,” Kong takes his prized sacrifice away. Quickly after this event your friends manage to show up and cut you lose from your bindings! So now yourself along with two of your friends manage to sneak away from the crowd and head your way out of the fortress you’re in. However you are eventually spotted in your escape attempt and are then showered with a beautiful array of flaming arrows! Well, maybe not beautiful, but cool to see at least. So while dodging this attack along with the flaming ground, you eventually make your escape with only having one of you hurt.

In terms of graphics, Ubisoft has seemingly done an excellent job so far to really deliver an authentic “jungle” atmosphere with this game. Not only do the character models look very nice and the bodily animations smooth, but the environmental effects look absolutely incredible! In many of the backgrounds that you will be able to feast your eyes upon, there is dense jungle, jagged rocks, boulders and those predefined footpaths are evident as well! To make things even more fantastic in regards to special effects, Ubisoft has worked extra hard to provide a realistic looking mist! Working with the natural effects of sunshine that brilliantly radiates through the trees, the mist’s effects are truly unreal. The sunlight shining through the mist will actually “thicken” the light like it would in real life, adding that sort of high density and humid atmosphere feel to the air. Truly awesome!

Now getting back to what the game is all about, once your small team eventually makes it through all the nature you’re trekking through, you eventually run into a small campsite that appears deserted. On the far side of this camp is a sort of cave that serves the purpose of protecting you from any kind of harm. There you will also find a nice collection of spears for you to use! Surprisingly each spear is actually given a heavy amount of detail. Whether it’s the intricately detailed and sharpened stone tip to the “stringy” bindings that keep it together with the rest of it.

Shortly after making it to this camp, you are already threatened with an attack! Unfortunately a hungry velociraptor has shown up and sympathy is something these creatures do NOT have. He immediately goes after one of your friends and begins taking a few nice bites out of his leg. Desperate to help, you pick up one of the many available spears and begin hurling them at the attacking creature. Unfortunately they do next to nothing to distract its feeding so you begin to feel truly helpless. But thankfully, an even hungrier creature shows up shortly afterwards! It happens to be a giant centipede, and lo and behold, it goes right after the velociraptor! So with the two of you seemingly saved, you breathe a sigh of relief. But wait a second, after it kills the previous attacker, it decides to then come after you! But thankfully this creature is far more vulnerable to the spears you previously tried to use and you take the creature out without much problem.