This game is terrible in every direction. Looks awful, plays awful, sounds awful, I feel awful.
I was lost every time because the map doesn't pinpoint your current location or display any goals. Instead, the game insists on "roaring" to find a point of interest, which will stay even after completing said objective. The game crashed twice during the end of a boss fight, twice. I was softlocked because an enemy didn't appear.
Despite all this, I still want more terrible movie/tvshow/ip tie in games. It's the perfect garbage shovelware C-list genre that needs to exist.

Rise of Kong é um jogo que desperdiça um potencial imenso, um personagem interessante que poderia ter sido melhor aproveitado. O game sofre com um map/level design tenebroso, parece que todo o tempo foi investido na primeira e última fase, que são competentes, mas todas a outras simplesmente copiam e colam recursos dessas duas, tornando a gameplay extremamente cansativa e repetitiva.

Durante a gameplay sofri com diversos bugs, crashes e glitches, que mudaram completamente minha gameplay e tornaram essa platina dolorosa. A falta de TP para voltar no mapa, pouca pluralidade de inimigos e uma gameplay que carece de novidades, fazem com que Rise of Kong seja fraco, mesmo sem levar os problemas de desempenho em consideração.

im so glad licensed games are in high gear, both bad and good
this is like a new dawn

...would rate devil may kong higher if i didnt get utterly softlocked on autosave with no hp leftover..
but thats okay because its not like i can make the public opinion of this worse by any means

there's some fun moveset things going on here and a unique low budget charm tht i think is reminiscent of late sixth gen shit and something that seems like itve thrived as a mobile game as promotion for a new kong game

Gonna be real here for a sec I didn't actually finish this game or even putting in more then 2 hours. all I kept hearing over the last 3 weeks is that this is without a doubt one of the worst games of the year and possibly one of the worst games of all time. And then I get back from my vacation to actually stream it with friends and it's............it's just shovelware trash. Don't get me wrong this is a bad game a very VERY bad game, but it's just the same old licensed video game trash that flooded the market during the 6th and 7th gen.
I just don't know what else to say about something that's hasn't already been said a bunch of times over about other games of it's nature. Oh wow it's a broken mess of a game that probably had the budget of a food court salad and probably had no time put into it's development, yeah wow cool that's such an interesting observation; fucking get in line. Do you know how many times GameMill has done this shit??? They make most of their money of crap like this idk what else you want me to say they've always been like this, this well is dried up and I have nothing insightful or interesting to say about this game.
Is the business model that GameMill practice a horrible and scummy system; yes.......................................................................................

I don't wanna put any more brain power towards thinking about this waste of time; I'm gonna go play that new Robocop game. At least that game looks like it had time and effort put into it, even if it does looks like one of those fake video games you see in a movie or tv show.

finally the public is able to experience this character the way the producers of the seminal 1933 film must have intended.

people have grouped this in with gollum because they are both bad games that came out in the same year. i have thought about gollum maybe every day since i beat it 9 months ago. this game is no gollum.

that being said, i have never seen a game begin to tear itself apart at the seams while you are in the process of playing it in quite the way this one did. i had to fully quit out of the game at least once in each level because after playing for a little while kong would start to run slower, wouldn't always respond to inputs, and his attack animations would start interrupting themselves so mashing buttons would result in constant wind-ups that never actually got to the frames that start to deal damage. this is why we play.

The type of shovelware well-meaning grandmas used to buy their grandkids for the Wii on Christmases and birthdays back in the late 2000s, now on the 9th generation of consoles! Look, developer IguanaBee was forced to make this under some brutal time and financial constraints. They're a talented studio which can be seen in titles such as their incredibly charming MonsterBag. Oddly enough, despite the ultimate results this might actually be further proof of said talent. In roughly a year, without guidance or proper monetary support from the publisher to staff a full team on the project, and after a bit of post-release patching to update stuff such as the map so that it now shows your position on it, they churned out an entirely playable open-world action adventure. Doesn't make it a fun experience, but it's impossible to not be at least minorly impressed with what they were able to accomplish (however minuscule) with so many hurdles in their way.

Alright, now that I’ve given its makers a somewhat obligatory “it’s okay bud, we know it’s not really your fault” pat on the back, it’s time to mercilessly crap all over this abomination! We are looking at a genuinely abhorrent product here. Sure, Rise of Kong is a disaster from technical perspective with bugs that cause you to inexplicably get stuck on invisible snares forcing autosave reloads, graphics that look like they're from a PS2 offering (and not one of the pretty ones), environments that sometimes awkwardly melt into shape as you approach them in a manner akin to a hallucinogenic induced trip, and audio quality so bad it needs to be heard to be believed, but its worst aspects are easily those opening chapters where things are unreasonably challenging.

If there's any ish I can’t stand it’s when a bad game doesn’t have the decency to just let you steamroll through it with little trouble. The early hours are brutally plagued by the titular ape’s pathetically limited range and wimpy attacks that barely chip away at the health bars of his enemies. Shouldn’t this have been some kind of power fantasy? Why am I getting wrecked by what appear to be little green dodo birds? At no point do you feel like a beast powerful enough to have slugged it out in movies with the King of the Monsters. Even the way basic trees and other objects in the scenery tower over him give the impression that you’re controlling a regular-sized gorilla rather than one humongous enough to climb the Empire State Building.

Eventually you do begin to attain the true might you would expect from a kaiju with the first name of “King,” but it never seems to be the result of your investments into any of the skill trees. I can’t prove it, yet I have this unshakable suspicion that the devs artificially lower the difficulty in later chapters to give players the ​illusion of getting stronger rather than legitimately allowing them to become so, because it’s not remotely believable that those meager initial stat boosts I was unlocking would have had such a profound ability to leave foes that were previously causing me problems all of the sudden crumbling at my feet.

Oh well, at least when that happens it becomes pretty smooth sailing to the credits. You’ll still struggle to reach them though. Your motivation will be low. The entire runtime of Skull Island is a mind-numbingly dull loop of running around massive maze-like environments of identical assets to find unmarked, sparsely located “ascension event” arena fights and pick up the occasional collectible on your way to the area’s boss. There are plenty of threats along the way, but engaging with them is totally pointless. Not just because the combat sucks either. Defeating foes outside of the required sections grants you no additional EXP points, meaning they’re literally a complete waste of time. You’re better off simply sprinting past everything and focusing exclusively on whatever boring platforming segment is between you and the next mandatory encounter.

As much as I believe the small Chilean indie developers mostly deserve a pass for this given the circumstances, it is simultaneously not hard to wonder why they continued to try to create a package so grand in scope rather than reducing its scale to something more reasonable. Perhaps they shouldn't escape blame entirely. Their ambition paired with the lackluster resources from GameMill seriously cost them here. There were quite a few shockingly dreadful releases in 2023 and Skull Island: Rise of Kong blows the few I personally played out of the water, proving far fouler than the likes of Gollum or even TWD: Destinies. Is it the worst game of that year? That's highly likely. It's easily the top contender in my eyes.

1/10