Glad to finally have my hands on this childhood classic of mine and it has aged more brilliantly than I'd hoped for. A grounded, atmospheric, and even sometimes terrifying survival game. The default settings are HUD-less, not even a crosshair. You use every resource available to you, mostly bone spears, to navigate the hostile Skull Island. Fight dinosaurs, giant centipedes, primordial gators, you name it. All of these monsters eat each other as well. Kill one and use it as bait to make your escape. Stick a big bug on a spear and throw it into thorny bramble to lure them in then set the bramble on fire to burn them all to death. It's filled with these little emergent moments. Then suddenly you play as Kong in a big monster brawler, climbing vines and breaking V-Rex jaws. Easily the gold standard for movie tie-ins, a genuinely great survival game on its own. The best game Ubisoft have touched.

Zenozoik looks more alive now thanks to UE3, but I can't help but miss what Source brought to it. Narratively this is the more impressive game, peeling back layers of this world I hadn't foreseen. My initial pull to Zenozoik was thinking about it's place in time, whether it was of Earth or a distant planet. These secrets are (partially) revealed in a way that makes you question the order of this world. Are the Zenos worthy of existing in a world of order? Can they even respond to order? The Corwid are seen to the inhabitants of Halstedom the same way the Zenos on the whole are likely seen by the world outside, if that world even still exists. They are a people without history or the means to live in a world devoid of chaos.

Anyways, mechanically this is more complex, but I feel a bit like I miss the simplicity of the first. The introduction of combos is welcome, but there are 2 combos taught at the end of the tutorial that will carry you right through without error. The ally system is cool, but also sort of needless. You're pretty capable of taking on most enemies in the game on your own, even in groups, and the healing time on allies can mean you won't even be able to summon them when you most need them. You can level up now, but I wish this was a little more fleshed out and that maybe the XP was tied to enemies encountered rather than tokens found in the world but it does reward exploration and I was all too ready to explore.

This all may sound a tad underwhelming, but I can't speak more highly of the atmosphere these games offer. The design and mystery of Zenozoik make me want to see every corner, better understand the lives of these chimera. The score in this one is evocative of a time and place beyond ours, it's so good. A fantastic game and sequel and I'm looking forward to Clash. I'm late to the ACE party, but I'm eager to play more of their games.