Good
Primarily, the game delivers a seamless, engrossing game experience, relatively unfettered by contrivances like in-game cutscenes and intrusive interface elements. A whole lot of effort was put into making the world seem vibrant and alive, and this has similarly paid off: from the AI characters that accompany you throughout your Skull Island trek, to the flesh-hungry beasts that assail you all the way, the presence of every character in the game contributes to its excellent atmosphere.
The game's flaws, though, are unfortunately just as easy to point out. The game's third-person elements -- which cast you as King Kong himself -- feel underdeveloped compared to the rest of the game. While they're still enjoyable during the relatively short spurts in which they surface, it's clear why there wasn't more of an emphasis on them: they simply aren't as fleshed out as the rest of the game.
Since Peter Jackson's King Kong is yet to hit theaters, we have no way of judging how much of a crossover there is between plots. Still, we'll refrain from giving away any details about the story in our review.
In any case, enter: Skull Island. Uncharted, and thought only to exist in myth. Ambitious movie director Carl Denham (played by Jack Black in Jackson's film) is dead set on shooting his next feature there, and thus embarks on a dangerous voyage with his crew aboard the freighter Venture. Among others he brings along screenwriter Jack Driscoll and budding starlet Ann Darrow. You play a good majority of King Kong as the compassionate, level-headed Driscoll and as you'd expect, the group eventually not only finds Skull Island, but finds itself marooned thereon.
If nothing else, it's a great setup for some genuinely riveting first-person action. The sequences in which you're playing as Jack are, at their best, richly immersive, and at times, genuinely terrifying. See, Skull Island is a place that's been somehow frozen in time, and the fauna is generally of the enormous, man-eating variety. Factor in the relative scarcity of modern weaponry, and you start to see the sort of urgency that the game creates.
Roughly half the time, you'll have access to firearms of some kind: shotguns, pistols, sniper rifles, even Thompson submachine guns, all thoughtfully airdropped via seaplane by the Venture's crew. But the other half of the time you're going to have to make do with what the environs provide. Spears, in other words, either crude wood-and-chipped-stone instruments strewn about by the island's native inhabitants, or even cruder ones fashioned by you out of bone piles that seem to permeate the island.
