There's a lot going against the PC version of King Kong: it's too short – if you play it consistently you'll be finished within a few days' time; it's peppered with technical issues, especially if you have an ATI video card – it likes to freeze, crash, and suffers from apparent memory leaks. There are control and gameplay issues while playing as Kong himself, and the end sequence feels rushed and tacked on in order to get the game out the door. And yet, despite these problems, King Kong succeeds because of its outstanding setting, its marvelous use of sound, and the fact that several scenes are sure to scare the bejeebers out of you.

Skull Island Comes Alive

Skull Island is caught in a time warp, of sorts. While the game takes place in the 1930s, Skull Island, home of Kong, is stuck in the past – as in dinosaurs and man eating centipedes litter the landscape.

In the game you play script writer Jack Driscoll who, along with several others, make the trip to Skull Island to shoot a new film. Obviously, things go a tad awry as the lead actress is kidnapped by natives and sacrificed to Kong, who proceeds to take her deep into the jungle. You and the rest of the team embark on a terrifying adventure to rescue her from the clutches of an enormous gorilla, all the while trying to figure out how in the hell you're going to get off the island.

The gameplay is fairly good, but the star of the show is Skull Island itself. It looks fantastic and feels truly alive. King Kong does a wonderful job of sucking you into its world. If you have a good set of PC speakers, crank then up and play with the lights off. It's that kind of game – it only works when you set the proper mood because the goal of the game is to put you on edge – to make you feel like you're trapped on a prehistoric island with limited ammo and 1930's era weapon technology including a sniper rifle, shotgun, and spears. It’s not an ideal place to be and the game is fantastic in providing you with a real sense of dread. It's pretty tense to see a full grown Raptor charge you, while you're waiting for it with a flaming spear because your shotgun ammo ran out.

Part of this can be attributed to the fact that there no discernable interface to break the illusion that you're playing a game. There's no health meter or anything else to block your view of the surroundings. The damage model is pretty simple: if you take a direct hit the screen blurs and you start to hear sad death music – this means that one more direct hit and you're a dead man. After a few agonizing seconds, Jack recovers and you're ok again. It's the same when playing Kong. Kong can take one serious hit from a large boss monster and after that, he falls.

The game's "puzzles" are a bit of a letdown. Not that you need mind bending puzzles to enjoy a game like this, but it asks you to do the same kind of "find the missing lever" puzzle over and over again, and it gets a bit monotonous.

King Kong, the Prince of Persia

King Kong takes several pages from Ubisoft's Prince of Persia series, particularly during the chapters in which you play as Kong himself. Kong can "walk" on the side of mountains via vines, the screen slows down during combat when a big blow is landed, and Kong does all sorts of acrobatics while he chases after Ann. The problem with this part of the game is that it all feels canned. When Kong wall-walks and grabs onto things to flip around, you feel like it's impossible to mess it up. Like most of the Kong chapters…it looks really cool but the gameplay isn't all that compelling.

As Kong you do a lot of chasing, but also a lot of fighting. Again, this is amazing to watch but not as much fun to play. You can grab, swipe, do a gorilla chest thump, and other basic moves while fighting huge T-Rex (called V-Rex in the game), giant bats, and other nasty creatures. The battles are more button-mashing fests that anything else. Some of the V-Rex fights are fun but this part of the game just doesn't feel as fleshed out as the first person portion. Watching Kong tear open the jaw of a V-Rex is pretty darn cool, but getting to that point just isn't all that rewarding.

Bugs and Glitches

The PC version suffers from quite a few technical issues. On an ATI video card it crashes way too often. You may see the grey screen of death where the game totally locks up, needing a machine reboot, or it just may crash back to windows. In all, the game crashed about six times, each time screwing up a save game checkpoint, which is infuriating. Another problem is that at times the frame rate drops so low that it's unplayable. Quitting the game and reloading fixes the problem, but something just isn't right about the performance of the game even on a pretty good PC.

Because of the technical problems, it's tough to solely recommend the PC version of Kong over the other platform versions. If the PC is your only option, it's definitely worth playing but you need to realize that if you use an ATI video card, and a lot of you do, that you're going to run into some problems. None of them are game killers, but are no less annoying. (On the plus side, people who use an Nvidia card seem to be in safer water in terms of the crashes.) You also need to ask yourself is playing a game that you're bound to finish in less than a week's time worth $40, because since there's no multiplayer, after Kong takes his spin around New York City, there's very little reason to play the game again. - William Abner