In the same year that ‘Spider-man 2’ demonstrated that games based on franchises can deliver incredible experiences, two games have also been released that take us back to worse times, when movie-based video games were nothing short of a (well-deserved) joke. Just a few months ago, we would have said that Gollum was, hands down, the worst game of the year due to its crude mechanics and dreadful gameplay. But it got lucky. It has found itself a new competitor… even more embarrassing.
The King of Boo
We had gone more than twenty years without a game featuring the giant ape, since Peter Jackson’s adaptation of King Kong, which was quite decent (unless you played it on Nintendo DS, where it was an unbearable mess). We were all convinced that with the arrival of the Monsterverse and the battle against Godzilla, we would get more games featuring the giant ape. But in the case of ‘Skull Island: Rise of Kong,’ we would have been better off without the hype.
It was a video on Twitter that drew attention to the game’s cinematics, which showed a statically rendered dinosaur attack they had somehow forgotten to animate: this isn’t going to be good. There’s just no way it could be… And the gameplay doesn’t help either, offering a third-person exploration game with ugly designs that turned into a bland experience with no incentives whatsoever.
On a gigantic island filled with enemies to battle, Kong always encounters the same foes in the same places. It’s quite a coincidence. Moreover, sound, image, and graphics bugs are a daily occurrence, turning the return to Skull Island into an experience we wish we hadn’t lived through. The distributors are, as we might have imagined, Gamemill, experts in doing things cheaply, quickly… and poorly.
They are responsible for ‘Big Rigs,’ one of the games famous for having the most bugs in gaming history, but they have also handled generic Nickelodeon titles and versions of ‘Zombieland,’ ‘Cobra Kai,’ or ‘G.I. Joe.’ Oh, and a game featuring Olaf from Frozen for Nintendo 3DS that Disney pretended didn’t exist. Please, someone should treat the most famous gorilla in history with dignity.
