Skull Island: Rise of Kong

How did Kong become that angry giant ape? How did it happen, what are his origins and background? These are questions that I personally have never in my life heard anyone ask. It's a big ape. Who is captured and then entranced by a miniature woman that he carries with him to a high rooftop. Having to explain where his "anger" comes from feels ridiculous, but it's still the best, or least bad, thing about this terrible licence perversion.

King Kong's parents were mercilessly murdered by a particularly vicious, bright purple horror lizard. Left alone, the wet, young, clueless primate sat under a bush and wondered what to do with his meaningless life? Before the bush could be freaked out by the incompletely useless, bug-ridden game engine, Kong decided that the only way forward was to avenge his father and mother. The terror lizards must die. All of them. Everyone must die. How to do that? They must be knocked over the top of the head with a typical "Hulk Smash", time after time after time after time after time. There is no other way and there is no other future for the film world's most feared banana peeler.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is a sight to behold. This kind of flabby, lazy, poorly developed licensed game drowned in bugs and poor game mechanics flooded the shelves 20 years ago, but not nearly as much today. Many people remember Superman 64, Robocop: The Game, Rambo: The Game, Fight Club, Transformers: The Game, Iron Man or why not the downright terrible game based on Catwoman? Rubbish, all of it. Mega rubbish. And GameMill Entertainment's newly released King Kong story sits best with this company, because it's genuinely horrible. Unbelievably bad.

Skull Island initially looks like it's from the PlayStation 3 era. A flat, poorly detailed, ugly island world drowned in texture problems and the ugliest lighting since Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie. You take on the role of Kong whose sole mission is to get from point A to point B, navigating through five levels and killing every lizard you see along the way. In terms of game mechanics, it's all about hammering the same button for about four hours before the misery is over and the only challenge that exists here is trying to reach the end without deleting the save file or falling into a texture hole, where you are then stuck (autosaved and fine).

The amount of bugs I encountered during my four hours with this miserable game is nothing to sneer at, or joke about. Falling through the ground texture or encountering 1200 faceless civilians in Cyberpunk 2077 feels like a honeymoon compared to this as Kong and his enemies flicker around as if they were trapped in some kind of glitch simulator. On numerous occasions I've had to restart the console I've been using, my save file has been deleted and the "skills" I've upgraded in the extraordinarily pointless skill tree have been emptied. There are mountains on Skull Island that hover 30cm off the ground, there are bushes placed on top of other bushes, and there are lots of textures that don't load at all along with all the other problems that live inside Skull Island: Rise of Kong.

Moreover, skipping along with Kong is horribly, incredibly, excruciatingly boring and his one-sided attacks are so unimaginatively pointless that it feels like genuine torture to have to spend half a Saturday with him. The five levels are large and all contain bosses, which would surely be challenging if it weren't for the fact that three of them got stuck in the ground textures and just flickered as I played, allowing little Kong to walk around and Hulk Smash-hammer them in the arse.

The graphics, as I already described, are horrible, and we're not just talking about tons of bugs and poor optimisation, either. The design is even worse than all the bugs. The developers Iguana Bee have chosen some kind of greasy children's programme style here, which feels super weird and has nothing to do with either King Kong or the film Skull Island, and on top of that King Kong and his horror lizard enemies look about as threatening as a teddy bear. Kong is also tiny and the scaling is so skewed and poorly done here that the feeling of being big, never ever occurs. Rather, as a player I feel like a mini monkey.

It's not helped by the fact that the storytelling is abysmal, as is the music and presentation. It's simply impossible to find a single part of Skull Island: Rise of Kong that doesn't border on record-breaking, which is why I'm forced to hand out our very lowest rating. This is by far the worst game of the year, without any doubt whatsoever.