MaximumPC 2006 04

I

n King Kong the game, you play as both Jack Driscoll and King Kong, reliv-

ing scenes from the movie—as well as other events that weren’t in the film.

Although the action is frantic, the overall experience is a stilted patchwork of

sequences, lacking the movie’s compelling storyline.

You’ll play the first half of the game as Jack Driscoll, in a fairly typical

first-person shooter. The gameplay is equal parts stealth and fast-paced action:

You’ll find yourself battling giant bugs, dinosaurs, and snarling bat creatures.

Bullets alone won’t defeat these beasts (you don’t get much ammo, anyway), so

you’ll have to be creative and use the environment and everything around you.

In one particularly creative sequence, we used fish as bait to lure raptors into a

bushy marsh, and then set the entire marsh aflame, sending the nasty raptors

to their Cretaceous maker. In this part of the game, the action seldom lets up

and is absolutely adrenaline-pumping.

The other half of the game is spent playing as the big boy—King Kong

himself—and it’s a completely different experience. Aside from the scale dif-

ference, you’re perched high atop the food chain, easily smiting enemies that

were a challenge during the FPS portion of the game. Dueling with several

T. rex’s makes for some ferocious fighting, even if the camera isn’t always

ideally placed. Controlling the combat with a keyboard and mouse isn’t too

difficult, but the button-mashing aspects of the game get frustrating quickly.

Kong’s last few levels in New York are also too brief, and the final battle atop

the Empire State Building is a letdown.

Unless you’ve seen the movie, the game doesn’t do a good job of conveying

the narrative. The game’s biggest pitfall is its inability to capture the emotional

connection between Kong and Ann that really comes through in the film. The

jungle’s beauty and awe-inspiring spectacle are all present and

accounted for, but the story

lacks heart.

—NORMAN CHAN

Peter Jackson’s

King Kong

Are you ready for hot man-and-beast action?

I

t’s not often a game like 25 to Life comes along. A game so lame and

insulting that it makes you want to reformat your hard drive after unin-

stalling it, just to get the stench off the platters. Sure, crap shooters have

been around since the birth of PC gaming, but blatant rip-off titles like this

GTA-wannabe deserve to be shunned, renounced, and burned in a fiery pit

for the abomination they are.

You’ll play three different characters as you progress through this third-

person shooter—two gangsters and one police officer—all intertwined in a

cheesy tale of betrayal and revenge. The variation in how each character’s

story plays out is breathtaking. You start as a character named Freeze, and

in the very first level you slaughter hundreds of cops. Next you play as a cop,

slaughtering hundreds of bad guys. Then, you are another gangster who has

to slaughter hundreds of bad guys, and so on and so forth. The levels are

so incredibly linear and repetitive that it’s laughable and boring. You move

forward, kill everyone you see, pick up the floating health pack, turn the next

corner, and repeat, until the silly and profanity-laden cutscene arrives. The

entire six-hour experience is like this. Once you’ve played this game for five

minutes, you’ve seen everything it has to offer.

The multiplayer experience is thankfully better than the single-player,

but that’s not saying much. It’s essentially team deathmatch, where you and

your posse run around trying to kill everyone on the other team. It’s reminis-

cent of early Quake deathmatch, or any other rudimentary online shooter. The

real treat is that when you accomplish side objectives in the single-player

portion of the game (such as 12 head shots in one level, for example), you’re

awarded special jewelry and other accoutrements in multiplayer, so other

players will recognize your skill. Sadly, the interface is so awkward that just

entering a server is a chore.

We also experienced several bugs, including vertigo-inducing screen-spin-

ning, audio bugs, and cutscenes playing way too fast to comprehend.

Need we even bother saying

that you shouldn’t buy this game?

—JOSH NOREM

25 to Life

Is calling it ‘digital crap’ too harsh?

It’s a little-known fact that aside from being king of the jungle,

King Kong was also a practicing dinosaur orthodontist.

There’s a lot of shooting in 25 to Life , but it’s all in the same

corridor-like areas, such as this Mexican alleyway. Yawn.

25 TO LIFE 2

$30, http://www.25tolife.com,

ESRB:M

KING KONG 8

$40, http://www.kingkonggame.com,

ESRB: T

reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

88 MA XIMUMPC APRIL 2006