Skull Island: Rise of Kong Review

ign.com:

Here's the thing about King Kong: He is not just an ape, he's a giant ape. It's his defining feature in the 1933 movie that birthed him and the ultimate cause of his tragic demise. Picking up people, climbing skyscrapers, fighting dinosaurs — being huge is King Kong's whole deal. Skull Island: Rise of Kong is bad for a lot of reasons, but the main one is it's a game that lets you play as an iconically large gorilla and somehow manages to make him feel exceedingly average. Rise of Kong portrays King Kong in the most bland way possible, and then it matches that mediocrity for everything else around him.

Rise of Kong lets you experience how King Kong became King Kong, which was apparently by beating a lot of things to death and getting really angry while doing it. After swearing revenge on the giant raptor that killed his parents like some sort of gorilla Batman, you’ll punch your way through each of Skull Island’s five levels, all of which are as massive as they are boring. There is absolutely nothing here you haven't seen before in a hundred melee-focused action games. Combat gives Kong a light and heavy attack, a dodge roll, and a block, and while you'll earn some special moves along the way, there is never any reason to use them. You'll encounter a small handful of different enemy creatures — dinosaurs, crabs, worms that pop out of the ground and spit acid — but the only variation when it comes to fighting them is when to dodge an incoming attack.

Killing the boss at the end of each level unlocks new, but not particularly interesting, abilities for Kong, like a ground-pounding punch that hurts enemies and can break through certain rocks, or a heavy attack that can stun enemies and break through certain other rocks. Each