Terrible videogame adaptations of movie properties are officially back, and the new King Kong game is here to prove it.
Remember when video games based on movie properties used to be consistently awful? I'm talking original DS-era, straight to the bargain bin shovelware. These days so many video games based on movies are disappointingly alright or even, ugh, worth playing on their own merits, like Alien: Isolation .
By comparison, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™ was a breath of stale air, but even it can't hold a candle to the recently released Skull Island: Rise of Kong, a game so horrendous it's already going viral on social media:
Actual cutscene
— Rick (@RickDaSquirrel) October 16, 2023
DO NOT BUY THE NEW KING KONG GAME. IT IS A COMPLETE SCAM pic.twitter.com/6hiCWOSnNc
The game came out just this Tuesday, but it's already sitting at an Overwhelmingly Negative rating on Steam, has many, many clips of its shoddy cutscenes and game-breaking glitches making the rounds on X (formerly Twitter) and has received scathing reviews by major gaming outlets like IGN.
Many people are calling this the worst game of 2023, dethroning even The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™, a game so horrendous that it single-handedly killed the studio responsible for it.
Rise of Kong: What On Earth Happened Here?
Naturally, this has people wondering how the game even came to be. Its publisher, GameMill Entertainment, has a portfolio that could be generously described as "mixed", so how did they end up with a license for King Kong, one of the most recognizable movie characters of all time?
And why did they give it to IguanaBee, a modestly sized Chilean development studio whose previous projects were alright at best, critically panned at worst and nowhere close in scale to what Rise of Kong seems to have tried to be?
Well, to start with, the rights issues surrounding King Kong as a character are, to put it mildly, a giant headache that we don't have time for here (which might also be the reason there aren't many King Kong video games). To summarize: This particular video game is actually based on "King Kong of Skull Island", a lesser-known rewrite of the original novel and legally distinct IP that GameMill somehow obtained a license for.
As for how IguanaBee ended up with it, or how this game turned out the way it did, your guess is as good as mine. It could be a similar situation to The Lord of the Rings: Gollum™, where a studio with lofty ambitions was tasked with a project that was way out of their depth, given a budget and deadline that even the most experienced team couldn't hope to produce a quality product with, and sent out to die. But that's just pure speculation on my part. Personally, I'm itching to know what actually went on behind the scenes here!
Either way, after a year filled to bursting with incredible game releases it's almost comforting to see that 2023 has some awful ones as well. Don't let that tempt you into actually buying it though. This is not a "so bad it's good" kind of game and definitely not worth your time or hard-earned money.