Skull Island: Rise of Kong
Developer: Iguanabee
Publisher: Gamemill Entertainment
Release: October 17, 2023
Playtime as of writing: 6 hours (Game bought)
DO NOT BUY THIS GAME!
I went into this game knowing it was bad but figured I’d give it the benefit of the doubt because it’s been over a year so maybe it got polished up since then. I went looking for patch dates and notes to see what was updated and found nothing. The only conclusion I can come to is that the game has never been patched, and after playing the game I believe it.
The game starts you off in a tutorial where you play as Queen Kong who is worried about her partner and son because they haven’t returned from hunting yet. You make it to the end of the level, witness your baby daddy get murdered and fight GAW. After getting a few hits in you realize you are doing no damage and realize that you’re supposed to lose. Baby Kong watches his parents die and runs away and vows revenge. Fast forward and Kong is all grown up and ready to finally avenge his parents.
The gameplay is simple, there are 5 stages, you start at one end and go to the other where a boss is waiting, beat the boss and unlock a skill. As you move through the stage you run into “ascension challenges” and beating those gets you skill points. Ascension challenges range from kill everything to destroy all the nests, and by range from I mean just those two things. You can also find collectibles but those are pointless, finding the first one gets you an achievement but after that it’s just padding. You can punch things and you can dodge roll. You spend skill points to make Kong punch things harder or to take less damage from getting punched. There is a stamina meter that depletes when you use heavy attacks but not when dodging so I do not qualify this game as a Souls-like. If you run you do have a rolling attack. Each skill you unlock from beating a boss has 3 possible paths on the tree, but you can only go down one path. You’re supposed to be able to reset the skill points but you can’t do that during combat and out of combat I never tried it.
Some times after loading Kong would just stop fighting. You’ll press the attack button and if Kong is close to an enemy he’ll just do nothing. At first I thought maybe it was my controller since I’m still using an xbox 360 controller but no, he still wouldn’t attack if I used my keyboard. Reloading the game fixes the issue until you move to another area and Kong just gives up again. I’ve noticed when Kong doesn’t feel like attacking enemies he won’t do his rolling attack, so that could be your indicator to save and reload if for some reason you still decided to buy this game.
At first the levels might seem big and open but they aren’t, they’re linear but they do loop back on themselves to make back tracking quicker if you just NEED to search every inch of a level for collectibles and ascension. There are also alternate entrances to later stages that you can get to by slamming into the ground except the devs forgot to add collision on the breakable part of the floor so you just fall through it.
By the fourth stage I was just running past everything waiting for the next ascension to trigger on my way to the boss. The enemies and Kong have the same running speed so if you run past them they can’t catch you and eventually you’ll find a ledge you have to jump up to or down from and they’ll just stop following. I played the boss fight of the fourth stage three times and all three times the game crashed right at the end. I was just going to leave it at twice but someone on the steam forum said that if you set it to low quality that the game won’t crash. Another person said that if you lose once and then win the game won’t crash but I’m not doing that again. Kong will just never get to avenge his parents.
Also the game has a $15 DLC pack that’s just a boss rush mode, some skins, and some filters but if you own the base game you can not buy it. You can only buy it as a bundle with the base game and if you already own the base game it will only allow you to buy it as a gift for someone. The game is ugly to look at anyways, so unless there’s a filter to make Kong not look like this hair is thinning all over it isn’t worth it.
Don’t buy this game. I bought it on sale for $8 which is way better then the normal price of $40, but I knew what I was getting into, I had this game on my steam wishlist just watching and waiting for it to be under $10. The devs don’t care about this game, so why should you? Kongs biggest enemy wasn’t GAW it was the bugs.
I’ve come this far, might as well make it a trilogy of reviews…
Don't buy this game
The world is barren and boring
