Kong: Survivor Instinct – A Game Review – Indie Game Reviewer – The Best Indie Games
KONG is a looker. No, not the big ape (though he is a handsome fella, no doubt), but I mean the world design. We are spoiled these days. Shaders, lights, textures, and physics combine to make deliciously edible dioramas you want to reach into the screen and pick up. The scenery is so beautifully done that it’s a peril of the genre we just run past.
I had the same problem with Trine 2 – I often got entranced by the scenery so much that I didn’t want to clear the level. INSIDE was a looker too, but its subdued monochromatic look dragged you forward like a comic book as it told its story.
If you played or are familiar with This War of Mine, you’ll be in familiar territory here. To a point. Minus the real-world gravity of the powerful and essential message that game explored, the form factor is roughly the same. A 2D side-scrolling action adventure game.
That said, the game is wonderfully simple to play. While the game strongly encourages a controller—any controller—before the titles even come up, the keyboard is mapped to well-established standards: A and D to move L and R, W to climb a ladder, D to descend it, SPACE to jump, CTRL to crouch or drop-down, E to interact, and LMB to smash things. It’s just like riding a bike through the destroyed suburbs leading into the city.
The dread, the aftermath of the destruction, loom everywhere, but once you finally meet the big guy (which is not very far in), it’s…incidental. It’s as though the game is more about the post-apo world wrought by the monkey, but not the monkey itself. The protagonist is almost blase about almost being trampled by a 6-story-tall angry gorilla of legend. Oh well.
So let’s just pretend Kong has nukes, widespread climate change effects, or whatever. It really doesn’t matter.
But as you go, you find dockets about characters and then the Titans roaming the Earth, and it turns out the chimp isn’t such a bad guy. (If you know anything about Kong, you will likely know this.)
Combat has a few moves – block, parry, strike, grapple.
If you die from that or fall off a ledge, you will have to restart from the last checkpoint. Sigh. I hate this. Yes, there should be some penalty for failure states, but redoing the level and the fights isn’t that fun. Maybe if there were more dynamically generated. It’s standard platformer stuff. So be it. It’s just not that interesting to redo, especially because it’s not Super Mario Bros or Super Meat Boy.
Anyway, it might sound like I am not digging it. But that would be on me; I really like it. It takes me back to the XBOX Arcade days. It feels like XBOX Arcade days, playing Shadow Complex, but with graphics brought up to modern-day standards. (Shadow Complex graphics were great, by the way.)
The sound design is good, and the ambient music is inoffensive. All interactions have nicely curated, subtly implemented corresponding SFX. I mean, those shaders and textures are cached, right?
The shaders are great. It’s oddly slow to load up, though. Maybe I just noticed it because I played the game in shorter bursts.
Once you find them, you get a journal, an objective map, a dossier of unlocked character data, and fast travel checkpoints. All the conventions you’d like are implemented.
Eventually, you will get a gun. It’s useful for more than shooting people. Cool note: where you shoot them matters. Shoot ’em in the leg; they stop standing up. Shooting them in the head, they go down hard. Neat.
It then becomes more apparent why Kong isn’t as menacing, but I’ll leave that for you to discover. But you will be able to summon Titans for various reasons. You won’t just be backtracking on a 2.5D urban art showcase.
The journal and character dossiers fill, new objective types are added, and fast travel becomes more meaningful. It is generally a joy to play. Nothing too fancy or difficult, but that can be viewed as an enjoyable kick-back creature feature, not a giant fire-spouting bug.
If you like any of the games I’ve listed throughout this review (maybe Super Meat Boy is not a good comp), then you might like this. If you haven’t, it’s still worth checking out.
