King Kong Game Gets Five Bananas - Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie is an adventure to go ape over. But the Xbox 360 version delivers a nasty surprise. Game review by Chris Kohler. [Joystick]

Over the years, video games based off of movies have been given less than stellar reviews in the past. I’ve played a number of them and I can honestly say that while some of the gameplay might be great on a few, the overall games don’t do the movies justice. For Fantastic Four it might have been great to smash enemies as Ben or go invisible as Sue, and it might have been a treat to see some classic villains from the comics, but the game was barely playable. Mindlessly beating enemy after enemy and not being able to progress unless you use a special gimmick only related to a given team member’s powers or abilities gets to be very repetitive and the story mode (the only redeeming mode in the game) only takes a day and a half of continuous game play to beat. For Enter the Matrix, it was all about following storylines related to two lesser characters from the Matrix sequels, and as far as I could tell, they were only loosely related to the movies. It would have been more preferable to play as Neo, what could be better than being The One himself? I have yet to play the new game that was just released following Neo, though. Even the Spider-Man movie games, as entertaining as I found them, had their gameplay flaws. I mean, I couldn’t have been the only one with sore fingers from the copious amount of webslinging around the entire city of New York.

The new King Kong movie game, however, has been getting excellent reviews. Some even wonder how the movie could possibly top the level of immersion a player gets in the game. Though I’ve yet to play it (but certainly can’t wait to get my hands on a copy,) from the descriptions I’ve read and the screen shots I’ve seen, the game seems to be a lot more fluid and adaptive than your average ‘let’s follow the storyline already present and a couple of other wacky adventures’ movie game. Instead of gauges, meters, and a points system it is designed to be more realistic. So if someone other there was hoping to score 50 points for taking down a T-Rex, sorry, you’re out of luck. The gameplay alternates between Jack Black’s character Jack Driscoll and the big monkey (yes, I am well aware that he’s really an ape) himself. While playing as Kong is likened to a linear ‘Hulk Smash’-a-thon, it’s in the play as Jack where it gets challenging. As previously stated there are no displays of any kind as a default, though a player does have the ability to turn on and off a set of cross hairs and a bullet count gauge. For the most part, the play has to rely on more natural cues to discern what is happening to the character. When he’s near death, the screen will get red and blurry, when he’s out of ammo, he’ll tell you. As for action and actually playing the game, things are dealt with in much the same way. You as a player have the versatility of using the environment around you. It’s possible to take dinosaur bones that you find lying around and use them as javelins to take down the creatures out to get you. It’s possible to use animals as bait to distract some of the more dangerous creatures so that you can either sneak by or close in for the kill without being spotted first. There are even sticks on fire available. For the most part is seems to be up to the players imagination as to how they will proceed through the game, barring, of course, being confined within the storyline.

Now while the game seems worthwhile, there is a bit of a warning to those who recently purchased the new Xbox 360: some of the graphics are poorly rendered when compared to other system’s versions of the game.

Please compare:

Jack Black on PS2

Jack Black on the 360

And the same is true for Naomi Watt’s character:

PS2

360

But in all, don’t worry as much about the graphics (unless they truly frighten you...small children very well might be,) just enjoy what promises to be some outstanding gameplay and a genuinely good movie video game.