Skull Island: Rise of Kong Switch Review
This year, gamers have been blessed with a large selection of amazing games, and it would certainly seem that Switch owners have been eating particularly well (especially this month) due to a full slate of releases that have scored well. So much so, I have had complaints that What’s it Like scores too high, or only reviews “good” games so to speak. Well, it’s safe to say that this high score streak has been broken with Skull Island: Rise of Kong, the latest offering from IguanaBee, which aims to tell an emotional story of Kong and how he came to be, but spectacularly fails on all accounts. Let’s find out why.
The story of Rise of Kong tells of how Kong came to be after losing his parents to a dinosaur attack and narrowly escaping with his life. As the player, unfortunately, you don’t escape, and are subject to the biggest battle of them all, playing this fundamentally broken game. The story is told with jarring cutscenes that are poorly animated, almost comical facial expressions, and sometimes textures so blurry, that I couldn’t even see what was going on. There’s even a now infamous cutscene when a crudely placed picture of a dinosaur exists instead of an animation, as if it was a placeholder to be fixed later.
The graphics of the game have the Unreal Engine blur to them when playing in handheld mode, which I’m not sure why since the actual engine looks so incredibly dated, it would be able to run on a PS2-era machine. Environments are bland, textures are low resolution, and the inhabitants of Skull Island are unimaginative a hard to discern as they appear to be a blurry mess of colours walking nonchalantly towards Kong as they attempt to attack him.
The gameplay consists of buggy and broken combat and platforming as you navigate Skull Island with poor checkpoints, and infuriating mechanics. I didn’t finish the game as I reached a checkpoint with low health, and was unable to complete the section to move forward. After 1 hour of trying to move forward by charging through the enemy and running back and forth, I simply game up. The enemies seem to be able to hit you no matter where you’re positioned, and a lack of health indicators means you wildly punch, roll, or attempt to jump attack when the controls work. Sometimes, attacks work, other times the button combinations don’t do anything. Platforming sections are also frustrating with certain areas meaning you have to position yourself right on the edge of a cliff to jump to another. There’s no flow or fluidity of movement, and it’s simply not fun to explore.
I have a core philosophy here at What’s It Like, and that’s to focus on the good of a game, while respectfully critiquing core gameplay and mechanics and I believe that reviews are subjective as there’s a game for everyone… I don’t believe that to be the case here. It is never my intention to put down anyone’s work as devs often work hard with long days and diminished budgets. Skull Island: Rise of Kong should have never been released in this state, and despite it already having an update, the game is still a broken mess. It’s an insult to the legacy of what is arguably the most famous monster behind Godzilla, it’s somehow a complete regression to the previous game released back in 2005, and to ask games for $60 AUD for it is a joke.
I would hate to say it gamers, but Skull Island: Rise of Kong only succeeds in one area, and that’s knocking the Lord of Rings Gollum off the podium for the worst game of 2023. Avoid at all costs.
