It says something when, with 2023 almost finished and with the Daedelic Games developed Gollum game set to win pretty much all “Worst Games Of Year” lists, GameMill reminded the populace that they could be the bigger fiend, and live up to their name….not that it would take them much to achieve that since they pumped out a lot of Nickelodeon licensed titles, including 3 kart racers in the span of 4 years.
And of course, Big Rigs, as they did release the legendary western kusoge of “racing” decades earlier under their previous handle, Gamemill Publishing.
(Strap in, this is gonna be a LONG one, fellas)
This one is surprising in many ways, not because it pretty much signified the return of the licensed tie-in showelware tier garbage (they also released a Walking Dead game some months after, and it was about as good as you’d expect), giving us a whiff of how these games still used to exist in droves up until the late 2000s, but because the license itself sound a little too good for this type of publisher, i mean, the Monsterverse movies revived Kong to have him fight Godzilla.
So, how the fuck did GameMill got hold of the license for King Kong?
Well, they didn’t get the license to make a tie-in to Legendary’s Monsterverse or even the Kong film series, but to the novels by DeVito Artworks, with of course the blessing of the Cooper estate that owns the Kong rights, with the copyright situation here being such a mess is incredible, so yeah, not too surprised they obtained the license obliquely with a series of novels based on the IP i’ve never heard about (i did know the film got a novelization later on, but still…), despite being actually authorized sequels to the original 1933 movie, including one titled “Kong: King Of Skull Island” which i’d hazard a guess was the one taken as the biggest reference/source for this game.
Developed by Iguanabee (whose’s only notable release prior to this is GI Joe Operation Blackout), the game – which i’m gonna refer to simply as “Rise Of Kong” from now on – was confirmed by the developers themselves to have been… “pumped out” in a year (which might sound like a lot to older gamers, but with modern development times, it equates to the old “6 months from inception to market”, beyond just “rushed”), with a lot of crunch, and given the final product, it’s hard to argue, because jesus if Gamemill didn’t do these people dirty.
And i wonder what the fuck was even the hurry, as Rise Of Kong came out in late 2023, so definitely too late to gleam in cultural “monster pollination” of 2021’s Godzilla VS Kong, and to early as the marketing for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire was almost non-existing, remember, the trailer for that movie was shown in december. This game release in mid-October 2023.
Not quite as random as Teyon choosing to do a Rambo on-rail shooter, 6 years after the last Rambo movie came out in theathers, not that it mattered because they ignored John Rambo, i guess it wasn’t as cheap to access the decades old audio recording for the original Rambo trilogy.
But we’re getting off track.
Once you’re adjusted to the fact it looks like utter shit for a late 2023 release, and the cutscenes are awful (to the point a flashback cutscenes at release contained a static jpeg of a dinosaur, as in it was clearly a placeholder asset that was supposed to be swapped with a dinosaur model being animated or modeled, but wasn’t because Gamemill forced the developers to release the game as unbaked it was) yeah, there’s the gameplay to deal with.
I mean, usually i’d discuss the plot, but it’s very simple: Kong parents die saving him from a big dinosaur called Gaw, and after having his “Batman moment” baby Kong moves out into the wild, survives over the years and getting stronger to take revenge and establish himself as the king of the Skull Island ecosystem in the process.
At least there is a narration by some random old witchdoctor-sounding woman that explains the legend of Kong and its purpose, its inconsistent, but it’s something that adds to the barren presentation that clearly looks like was fast-tracked to hell and back just be pushed out in stores. Because it was.
Before going any further, i feel it’s important to notice that the game did receive a patch (at least on the PS4 version, but i assume this applies for all releases of the game), which fixed the goof of the dinosaur placeholder JPEG, alongside other fixes to more important stuff like collisions, IA for bosses, platforming, which its surprising since it’s a Game Mill release, but it does address some of the glaring glitches and bullshit i’ve seen in footage from the videos when it launched,
But it’s a glorified band aid, like enemies can still simply forget to attack you all of a sudden, you can get stuck mid-jump into a log or clip with the enviroment, the geometry still feels off, the game has shadows tarped over a minuscole “cave”, for some fuckin reason, instead of using actual shadows they just put a flat black surface than you move through to see what it hid… often nothing.
Not even Banjo Kazooie in 1998 did that, and they could have, for a gag.
Continuing with the unfixed shit, the mini-crabs will still manage to move/slide towards you even when dead, so much is the momentum they apparently have when they move towards you, but this is a funny one that doesn’t actually affect gameplay.
It’s not funny how the game sometimes still misreads your inputs and Kong dodging thrice despite you pressing the button twice, or still moving seconds after you stopped using the analog stick, because the animation has still to catch up with the inputs, resulting in the feel that the character player is fighting against your control via some delirious footwork.
When Kong doesn’t decide to get stuck nearby a tree that’s scenery, usually you are not ever stopped in your movement by these puny trees, but in more than a few istances Kong will just get stuck into a tiny tree and you will be unable to even use the controls, forcing you to reload a saved game.
Yes, there’s autosaves, and they work as intended and they happen frequently, but sometimes to avoid further frustration and boredom of redoing some battles or sections and getting lost, i just reloaded the manual save i did, like i had to do when eventually i found myself locked into a battle arena/Ascension Event that FORGOT it had to spawn more enemies so i could clear the arena itself hence removing the barrier and move on. This is how LOW the bar is for Rise Of Kong, when i’m surprised the save features work as they should.
On top of everything, when we get down to it, the main gameplay loops are utterly senseless.
Combat is meaningless because you don’t accrue exp to obtain skill points, you obtain these only from boss battles or mini-boss battles that have you forced into a battle arena, when it’s not that you gotta destroy some nests, that’s all the variety,you get an upgrade early just because you’re start with 4 skill points in the first proper level, and you get 1 from the crab horde area battle. Yep, you get a singular skill point from these encounters (until you don’t), dubbed “Ascension Events” in the map, which are confusing because listing them like that will make you believe there are optionals, but mostly aren’t because you simply can’t avoid walking into them.
And combat in itself seems fashioned from a pre-Devil May Cry era PS2 game design bucket, meaning you get a main 3 hit combo of light attack, a heavy attack, a grab, and the ability to launch smaller enemies…. which was pointless since they didn’t receive or do damage, but that was oddly fixed with its only patch. You can also finish enemies, do an Amelia Watson approved ground pound manouver, aim a giant leap jump, that has you standing and then aiming the jump, the kind of stuff that i would expect to see in a pre-Super Mario 64 platformer.
Which stands in contrast to how the skill tree is one of the only aspects of design that feels somewhat modern, where everything else seems plain ancient, with its very early PS2 era designs.
Even worse, due to camera being quite zoomed out, it’s an incredible combination of the camera not only being a pain in the ass to deal with because of how it “hides” enemies that are small and pretty much camouflage within the shitty foliage they pass through, meaning the small enemies are more dangerous than the others because they most likely chip your ass to half health before you notice, especially the prehistoric birdies are annoying because they are fast and launch themselves at you.
Thankfully you can remedy this to a point due to having a lock-on feature, but the camera isn’t great with the lock-on either, it’s more “doable” but it still awful, feels disoerienting, and has the effect of making it hard to gauge how big is everything compared to everything else, because Kong feels way too tiny compared to the enviroments he moves in, and regardless the model for Kong more often than not clips into the ground constantly.
How they managed to make you feel tiny controlling KING KONG it’s unbelievable, i don’t blame the developers because i don’t think you could make it this way by design. Unbelievable.
That aside, combat’s sloppy to be generous, with stiff movement, one puny combo string, and a general shitty feedback to the combat itself, as enemies are pushed back and take in hits, yes, but in a way that they feel like they’re “tanking” hits, like they’re politely deciding to not ignore your combos because they have manners, even fodder enemies feel spongy, so it’s not very satisfying,
you can block, do a back-step and evasive rolls, a DKC style offensive roll attack, a Wario Land style shoulder tackle, and you have a ranged attack via throwing rocks (with a fairly correct auto-aiming feature for quick usage) or grabbed enemies or items like logs, so in theory it didn’t have to be complete garbage… but it is, even more as most moves really should have been part of the base repertoire, but are locked behind skill points upgrades with the tutorial level doing the Metroidvania thing of starting you off with a complete moveset only to lose it immediatly.
About enemies, the fact is most damage will be done by the small dino birds enemies that often sneak in attacks because they blend within the enviroment, by accident but they do, and in general the game uses& abuses every cheap trick in the book, so the best option is to simply stunlock their asses or attacking when they attack you, using the dash roll attack to stun them and make them go away (like excessively bouncing them back), finding which swing of the 3 hit combo will hit more enemies at once until you can unlock the “rage of the gods” mode to do more damage on the spongy ass enemies… that is, AFTER you unlock it back by beating the first boss.
I’m not joking, the game in the first proper level will still let you fill up the rage bar… despite you not being able to use the ability yet, and filling the rage bar, which is the only reason for even involving yourself in combat, since you don’t get anything else by beating these creatures outside of the designed battle arenas, themselves befuddling because there seems to be no rhyme or reason: some battle arenas are piss easy and short but give you 4 skill points, while others that are more challenging will just give out 2 or just a singular skill point.
Speaking of which, there is some enemy variety, but again, due to the “IA” your foes possess and the lack of any reason to fight them outside out the battle events it doesn’t matter, and hilariously, sometimes you can catch enemies fighting among each other, but i really can’t say if this was done on purpouse or it’s yet another glitch. At least this is a mildly entertaining one.
Bosses, even when they work as intended, are bottom of the barrell as well, that is, WHEN they don’t completely spaz out, even after the patch on my second try i had the second boss, the GIANT ENEMY CRAB (i miss Genji, i do), completely stop doing anything but taking in me spamming the base combo over and over, even after his mid-health cutscene and phase change he stood there taking my hits without breaking free or even seemingly trying to, until he dies.
And this sudden drop/flatlining of any IA can happen to other bosses, too, which at least is useful?
you can only heal by eating some plants that are placed around the levels, which don’t respawn, and there was an attempt at balancing by giving Kong a stamina bar for attacks, but it feel arbitrary which attacks use them, i get the charged heavy attacks, but the shoulder tackle not using any makes no sense, since it’s not even the case of the player having to use it as indirect defensive move due to lacking any dodge or parry, here you have block, parry and dodge roll abilities.
But again, a few upgrades to health and damage output will completely render pointless any reason to attempt any kind of strategy, so the problems cancel themselves out, in a way, and i can only imagine it being worst if they did try to make combat Souls-style with such barebone mechanics and system to also have the roll and shoulder trackle to drain stamina.
Almost forgot, you do have a roar, which can be used in combat to push enemies back, but its main usage would be exploration.
“Would” because it both works and doesn’t work.
You see, combat is terrible but exploration is worse, because i said this was kind of a Metroidvania… kinda, as in each area has some entrance leading to another level/area entirely, but the game basically forces you with the Metroidvania progression blocks in order to fashion out a linear progression, so you won’t be able to break a certain block because you didn’t earn the move yet by beating a boss… that would be the idea, as often Kong will just fall or pass through highlighted obstacles that require some ability you can’t have yet.
Not that the game tells you that the various levels/areas are interconnected, it just doesn’t, you only discern that going a certain way will have you enter an entirely new area only by some colored mist coming out of that direction, there’s no indication on the awful map you get, one that needed a patch to even add an indicator for the player character (again, i’m not joking) and even so manages to be even worse than the map in Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad on the X-Box 360, sure, they never patched that one so its a map that doesn’t actually show your precise location, just the general area/block you’re in, but that game at least explained what the icons on the map meant.
I’d say just a mini-map on the main gameplay interface would have helped, but that would have been normal, and Rise Of Kong has to be extra worse and find its own stupid way to do both an open world-ish AND linear game, i mean, it’s actually a shitty way to disguise that this is a linear game, which is made even more obvious by how the main, useful abilities for traversal and exploration are only obtained by beating bosses, so the open areas thing is a mere facade.
You’re not even encouraged to go off the beaten path, since the confusing level design will have you lost most of the times, and doing so will led you back to a previous area and a wall or boulder you can’t destroy yet, not that it matters because you can randomly sequence break by clipping through said obstacles, and it’s not like there’s some good reason to explore, aside from some actually optional battle arenas and some collectables with lore bits attached.
Obviously the level themselves feel more doodled than designed, haphazardly thrown together more like, and progressing in the game just makes it more and more clear this aspect, as everything looks the fuckin same and you’ll have to constantly check the map to ensure you’re going the right way, as you constantly feel like you’ve been walking in circles (which in most cases you will have been anyway, as everything looks the same), with a lot of of shitty, sometimes barely doable platforming because Kong struggles to land and do jumps in a even remotely trustworthy fashion.
But even the constanst map checking becomes virtually pointless because later in the game there’s more to what the map shows, like canyons and shit that are not clearly marked on the map, so yeah, even Bikini Samurai Squad was easier to navigate, because at least it was always an ensemble of corridors and linear areas, here instead you get swirwing (often overlapping too) sections of the area that simply are not shown on the map’s geography. Useless doesn’t even begin to cover it.
BUT WAIT, the roar i mentioned before can be used while exploring to show where you have to go next, basically doing an “echo scan” to highlight points of interests and enemies, but it doesn’t seem to work…… until you realize it DOES work, but it might as well not exist, because it creates a very vague “roar glow” as a waypoint marker… but the visual indicator lasts like 2 seconds on screen and the game doesn’t force the camera to highlight it, so unless you happen to have the camera set up so you accidentally notice the “roar feedback”, you might as well believe it doesn’t work.
Again, it might as well not exist, since it’s ultimately pointless at telling you where to actually go.
Just amazing how it’s best to ignore a good 50 % of the game unless the game itself forces you into it, the kind of “you don’t gotta concern yourself with it until you do” kind of classic design.
And now for a selection of glitches and stuff that will remind you this game was clearly, absolutely released despite being nowhere near finished, because a lot of shit it’s just utterly broken.
Animation finishers often will have Kong and the enemy move inside of a rock, when the enemy’s model doesn’t outright disappear, otherwise clipping is the norm, not the exception, the trees are often rooted in thin air 1 cm or more above ground into the aether itself, sometimes you can see some very sketchy artifacts on the ground that made me glad i do not have epilepsy, and once is uddendly sinked through the ground and out into the unprogrammed void, like it’s a 3 dollars asset flip on Stean, a void i’m assuming it’s infinite because i kept falling for 2 minutes straight.
Thank god the autosaves work, though i still don’t get why there are the slot for the autosaves and just one for the manual save, but i’m gonna have to make it clear that these actually work.
I would poke when at how even climbing vines will often result in the camera go inside of Kong and “doing an Assassin Creed Unity” because the block of vines weren’t put correctly, so he gets stuck on one and you have to wiggle him out and find another space when he won’t try climbing the vines inside out or something…. but then i once had the game simply refusing to read any of my inputs for the attacks, when i first entered the damp caves area, game almost immediatly didn’t let me attack of a sudden, so i had to reload the save to “fix” it.
Like for pretty much everything in this forsaken entertaiment product, you’ll wonder why the fuck it is like that, because some design decisions just can’t be explained or excused by the awful production cycle of few months and being whipped by GameMill, they just can’t, and just make you scream the famous AVGN line, desperate to find some logic to this madness.
This is the kind of game that has almost half of its players give up on the tutorial level, i mean, the fact that the trophy for finishing the final level has a 5 % obtain or the fact that the trophy for finishing the tutorial level has a slightly below 50 % obtain ratio… it speaks for itself.
And who can blame , because for all of his issues, what ultimately seals its fate its the fact that the game is just plain boring, tedious, on top of being so utterly unfinished, underfunded and broken.
You can be rough around the edges, sketchy, flawed, but if people can still get enjoyement out of your game, it’s not a complete miss. Rise Of Kong is not awful because it was clearly rushed to market in a few months by a team forced into crunch by an awful publisher that couldn’t give less of a crap and just wanted to have shit out on the market, doesn’t matter how unfinished the product is, just kick it to curb with the afterbirth in a glass jar, who fuckin cares.
Yeah, that definitely “helps”, but it’s also utterly boring, just a snoozefest that arguably peaks during its tutorial level, because you won’t have to waste hours to see the game at is very best, and this IS NOT one of the rare istances where “so bad it’s good” applies to a videogame (its far easier in films), this is the most common case, where the final product is so bad i’m surprised it was sold at retail, or sold for any amount of money at all, which in itself it’s insulting.
A mildly self-respecting publisher or some kind of actual standards agency would have culled this one out long before it could even dream of issuing physical disc printings, but this is GameMill, and if i didn’t go looking for this one EXACTLY because i heard it was atrocious and hence i knew i wanted to play it and have in my collection of kusoge reviews, i would agree, this isn’t a game, it’s a scam, a defective product that should have been recalled instantly.
But this is the videogames industry, after all.
I’ve seen worse, yet, but it’s no hyperbole to say this is one of the most broken, borderline unplayable shitfests i’ve ever played, and even knowing the awful conditions the developer Iguanabee was put into by Gamemill… it’s still unbelievable how shite it is, like, how the fuck did they managed to make you feel small while controlling KING KONG in a KING KONG GAME?
I’m not even harping on the devs, because i seriously doubt you could actually made it so bad if you even tried intentionally, so i guess it was just meant to be, in a sense.
in terms of aesthetics, my guess is that the cheap “cel shading-esque” gloss choosen was to make it feel like the comic book series it licensed, and the overall cartoony feeling would be nice, if they actually finished the damn thing, as even the usual texture pop-in issue is beyond the pale, the textures don’t really “pop” in as much as they amorphously manifest themselves into reality, they sludge themselves like slime entering through a fence, or like a Shoggoth entering our reality.
On top of everything else, it’s a very short experience, if you have the sheer fortitude, iron stomach and brainworms like me to even consider finishing it, ir is just 5 levels plus the tutorial, jesus, and of course the game doesn’t tell you the total playtime (i hate when they do that), but i’d wager something like 5 hours, tops. Maybe like 6/7 if you want to go back and do all battle arenas and find collectables, but even the trophies are glitched, as i got a gold trophy for doing all Ascension Events on the last area…. i didn’t, i missed one. XD
This is the kind of game that puts things in perspective, and actually makes you realize that the PS3/PS4 low budget Godzilla game was still A LOT better than this, despite it also being quite bad, it worked, and it had Jet Jaguar as a playable character. And let you made little dioramas.
Just go play the tie-in game by Ubisoft based on the Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, instead.
Wise Cafe (International) 