It's actually impressive how the devs made a game where you play as King Kong and they designed the worldspace to make it feel like you're just a regular sized gorilla
It was the weight and motion. Monster hunter managed to make small looks big and heavy, and big things looks absolutely enormous. It's because the environment respond to monsters. The environment is WEAK. Show it! In this game, you're a giant ape that somehow at the mercy of environment instead. What a chod.
It’s really hard to get that kind of scale right. Armored Core gets scale like that right but it still looks super goofy because instead of your mech looking massive, buildings just look like tiny dollhouses to me.
The worst part of all this is how mismatched all the colors are. There is no harmony. Bushes are so off in hue that they stick out like eye-sores, the mountains blue is also a completely different color palett tone than most of the greens used. They really went out of their way to mismatch the colors.
Come now, that’s an insult to the dentist office. One I went to went to when I was little I played Super Monkey Ball & another one had Battle for Bikini Bottom.
Fun fact: That dinosaur on the loading screen for a moment (I don't know if it shows up later because I haven't played it and I haven't watched that far into the video yet) is basically *directly* ripped from an unused concept for Jurassic World. For those who don't know, Jurassic World (then called Jurassic Park IV) was originally going to feature a fictional newly discovered dinosaur called the Malusaurus as the main dinosaur antagonist before it was replaced with the hybrid dinosaur Indominus Rex, and it's essentially a one-to-one match. The nose crest, small sail with spikes on the top and sides, long arms, quills on the neck, it's all there. Even the patterning is similar, with the stripes and red on the head. I guess Universal technically legally owns the design since they own both Jurassic World and King Kong at the moment, but come on.
I know nothing about this sort of stuff, but I'd assume that if the design was for a fictional dinosaur, and was never actually used in the film, that nothing could be done about others ripping off the design? I mean they could just say it's a huge coincidence or something.
@@sneezydeezymcdeluxe7015 a fictional design would in most cases be an original design by the studio/company so they would still have rights to it despite not releasing it. they can use it in concept art showcases for example
I do know a game that’s a port of a mobile game made to represent a console game. Crash Dummy(Switch, PS4, PC), which is a port of CID The Dummy Mobile, which is made to represent CID The Dummy(Wii, Ps2, and forgor the other console) Knew about this series through ReRez, if you wanna know how I know this.
When I was akid I went to a theme park in Italy that had a full sized animatronic king kong model, it was laid down as if it was tirmed up, and it breathed and roared. It was impressive for the 80s. This game just shat right inside that wonderful memory...right inside.
The funny thing is that could’ve been the one redeeming quality of this game. Maybe if it was $3 and had a bunch of speed run potential it wouldn’t be that bad.
To be fair, he's meant to be based on the original King Kong who was roughly 18-24ft tall as opposed to the modern MonsterVerse Kong who's over 300ft tall. Unfortunately the game doesn't give a good sense of scale and they made the environment and enemies way too big, so he ends up looking tiny as a result.
@@DONKFORTRESS6956 Yeah but Charlie is tall as hell bro. He’s a whopping 5’6, or in other words, 5 miles and 6 kilometers tall. So I don’t think we should be too harsh on the Kong for that.
I feel sorry for the developers. Based on what I'm reading the publisher only gave them 1 single year to build this game. Game mill apperantly gave them no real details about what they wanted the game to be about. It seems as if the developer was rigged to fail
There's already a comment explaining that in details. Apparently another company told them to make a random quick game about King Kong. They accepted because they needed the money to make an actually passionate project, so they needed to save as much money and time as possible, so they put the least amount of effort as they possibly could to make a slightly playable game
For people who are curious, this game has been developped by IguanaBee, a small studio that has made about 5 games that clearly are not anywhere near what you would call "AAA" titles (more on the side of mobile games actually). And it has been published by GameMill, a publishing company that base their economic model on selling licence games for the sake of generating profit. From my understanding as a junior artist who has worked in a similar type of games studio here in France, under greedy publisher, you can be sure it's basically a command... The publisher say "hey can you make that soulless game idea about King Kong that no one asked for? Here's some money." and the studio accept because they need it to grow as a company to actually make their own passion games, then they may have about one year to finish it, with a team mostly composed of interns and people who do not always have the experience on next-gen games (working with open areas, bigger scope, ...) and they send it to the publisher, who sells it for 40 bucks, which we can all agree, is absolutely shameful and outrageous... So yeah, this side of the gaming industry really sucks, and I do hope it gets better.
from personal experience, this game could also be a case of "i know we only have 2 coders and like one and a half artists on our team, but im pretty sure we can develop a functioning mmo rpg pvp pve crafting base building and exploration game with a gripping storyline with the budget of 500 euros and 3 months development time!"
It genuinely looks like a free mobile game that I would play when I was like 10. I used to play a ton of free mobile games where you would play as an animal and fight things, and this is actually SO similar to them.
this looks like the first game you're assigned to make in your first class of game design. like, a basic character that navigate an environment and can interact with things.
As a final year game design student, Yes... I remember doing that exact premise for my level design unit where the character can interact with the environment / some poorly scripted AI's
Even their own art style is so confusing like a realistic, cell shaded, cartoonish, janky, and asset flip bullsht. Even the trees are super small to the point where the crabs looked so big.
The story of gollum is actually quite a sad one, the studio actually made quite a few cool games, point and click adventures, still beyond me why they where tasked with a thrid person gollum game.
Yeah I agree! Also not to be tht guy but people are allowed to fail at making things good, that’s just art! I mean they shouldn’t be charging that much for it but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to fail at something. Especially when like you said the company was not used to making those types of games
@@trashmix2184 yeah, absolutely stupid that they where tasked with that, but guess they had to do something, as point and click adventures don't really sell anymore.
@@jaegarbombs7297 I don't think any video game of a franchise is Canon, they might do call backs to the story but other than that I would say no but idk correct me if I'm wrong.
It's really sad because the studio that made gollum made amazing point and click adventures, it's depressing to know that they won't be making any more games because of one bad/terrible investment
As a German, I'm just disappointed that my country can't even hold a _negative_ record in the video game industry. Go big or go home, even if you "go big" for setting a new bar for bad games
According to steamdb, this game is about 5.2 GB. A good-looking N64 game like Majora's Mask is about 32 MB, which makes Rise of Kong take up a whopping 162 (!!!) times the storage space.
He means the publisher, like sony, nintendo or steam that sometimes put time and money on indie games and advertise them in their social media and others plattaforms@@Salok_z
Doubt it. This was published by Gamemill, the same folks that were more than happy to present Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing to the world. "YOU ARE WIN!"
It's wild that a game from 2005 featuring Kong was miles better than whatever this is. And that was a movie adaptation too. 'Peter Jackson's King Kong' absolutely slapped!
I miss all those movie adaptation games. Like I enjoyed hogwarts legacy but I would rather just have a new game that lets you play through the films. Lego are the only ones who still make those sorts of games.
Which indie dev? I can believe a team of 3-5 devs making a better game in a week, but you gotta think about UI, level design, audio, models, animations...
@@PacoReer Depends on how you measure better. If they mean that you need to have the same amount of content, same style, etc, then yeah I think it'd take longer than a day (and if stock assets are allowed). But if literally anything goes, then 48 game jams have a ton of solo devs put out some genuinely fun game in a short time span. Some last minutes or can be surprisingly full featured. Certainly not to the level of Kong, not that I've seen.
Not really. I guess if they are just copy pasting assets then yea..but that’s not really making a game. If you are talking about doing all the coding, animations, models, textures, and everything else then theres no way a single person is going to do that in a single day.
I actually feel really bad for the devs of this game. I guarantee they had no time to work on this, maybe a year max, and probably had a small team to boot. I also feel really bad for anyone who's passionate about [making] games and then they get stuck on a game like this.
That's the sad reality we live in. The devs are paid poorly, probably face a lot of abuse, sexual harassment and discrimination at work, have to work overtime to release a horribly rushed game and despite them trying their absolute best to make it work somehow, they'll end up getting all the blame for the mistakes of their bosses and not only end up being hated by gamers but probably also end up losing their job for their "incompetence". It's not about quality anymore. It's just about microtransactions and squeezing every single penny out of people who have an addiction.
And then people wonder why the industry never changes, always held in the vice-grip of greed. Of course it'll never change when everyone's blaming the ones receiving the orders as opposed to those giving them. It's why I can't stand the majority of video essays on the topic that attempt to pin the downfall of this industry on anything but capitalism's rampant excesses. @@NoxAtlas
Which is weird because King Kong 2005 came out alongside the movie and kind of banged. It's also like two decades behind this masterpiece and somehow looked and played better.
tbh you could probably open the menu before the trigger zone as you jump forward to the ascension zone, and the save option should be up, which then will enable u to save inside the ascension zone
It's so funny to me that they made Kong normal-sized. I know that he's most likely young and therefore small but it doesn't make much sense to have a game about one of the biggest monsters in pop culture be as big as Harambe. They couldn't even get that right.
Probably to make life easier than the size difference would have made, there's only so much you can do with imported free assets . I'm honestly more surprised they actually had a 100 IQ moment and made the trees smaller
Might be to get around Copyright The original Kong novel this is based on doesn't have Kong be that big, He's only like twice the size of a normal Gorilla He's only shown to be like 25ft in the 1933 movie, and bigger and bigger every movie thereafter
When I saw a loading screen, it finally came to me that it's an actual licensed King Kong game and I transcended from a carefree smile to a sorrow disgust-filled jawdropping mug. Wow.
There's actually a King Kong game from the early 2000s based off the Peter Jackson movie you play as Jack and Kong himself with some insane boss fights I recommend checking it out if you have a 360 or a PS2 laying around, hell even the OG xbox has a version as well.
I’m going to give skull Island this one credit, and just this one: it never once set the bar too high. As far as I know it never tried to be something that it wasn’t, and I genuinely forgot that it was happening until I started seeing people talking about how bad that it was. Compare that to Gollum where it was nothing but studio mandated hype the entire time. Game awards trailers, all kinds of previews, delay after delay just to get it right. You’d think the studio believed that Gollum could be the next metal gear. They wanted you to believe that they were giving you the next evolution in stealth games.
today i actually got to speak with one of the guys that did the cover art. it was all done in 3d, but the devs asked them to make it seem more like a painting. why? because they said that the cover art is better 3d than the game and they didn’t want the player to think that the 3d in the game was that good.
The sad thing is that the premise of the game is actually pretty cool, a game about Kong's life on Skull Island with him battling other creatures for dominance and eventually becoming king of the island, yet they somehow managed to screw it up...
Then you might like the book this is based off. Kong king of skull Island, half of the book is a prequel and the half is a sequel to the original king Kong. Its on audible but it's worth tracking down a physical copy for the amazing artwork.
The thing that makes Lovecraftian horror scary is that the entities do not care about us, they just exist, and them simply existing pose harm to us. Kong just bitched slapped that red DInosaur dragon thing, it shook its head like it got bit by a mosquito, before turning around without a care , accidentally tail swiping Kong. Truly a Lovecraftian horror moment.
"PETER JACKSON'S KING KONG: THE OFFICIAL GAME OF THE MOVIE" was released 18 years ago and had better graphics and Kong gameplay, and the Kong gameplay wasn't even the main focus of the game..
I feel the main issue is they wanted to have you play as kong but realized if they made all the enemies proportionally small most if not all boss fights would be boring unless they turned this game into more puzzles than fighting so they had to scale everything up until kong started to feel even smaller than a normal ape lol.
That's a good point, how would one even make a good kong game. This a less of a defence of this trash game and more a critique of even attempting to make a kong game in the first place. There are very very few monsters that are his size, but then maybe they should've made a boss rush game like shadow of the colussus?
@@lordnignog1688 nah. they will still lose money from it. it costs hundreds of thousands to make a game even this shit, they aint getting that much back
It amazes me that in Armored core, a game where giant robots are made to look fairly human sized in game, they still look taller than the skyscraper monkey
"Release a game so bad it will make our mundane/mid-tier garbage appear to have some artistic value." Well played, western game development studios... Well played.
Omg yeah. It’s the kind of weird indie game you find on the Xbox 360 store and play it cause it’s 3 dollars (or free) even though it sucks. Except this is supposed to be a proper game and it costs 30 dollars
At 11:20 mark. That’s the exact same cutscene/ or finisher from God of War 2018. Kratos submits the tutorial boss. Kratos gives a war cry and then kratos finishes the boss. This is the exact same cutscene.
At least in Gollum they actually bothered to make their own models and textures, plus there were some points in the game that actually looked pretty nice. Here, everything looks like the regurgitation of every free game-making asset to ever exist while still managing to look boring.
11:52 Ever heard of a magical concept called "money laundering"? Same reason why some "artists" get away with selling a blank canvas with a splash of black paint for like 50 million dollars lol
Facts lmao I think your onto something bro because in what f*cking reality did a entire dev team spend over a year working with thier company making this sh*t and turned it into the higher ups saying it's done and they gave it the go ahead to be released??!!🤯🤔 And not only did they actually have the audacity to put this pile of burning garbage out... They priced it at 40$ DOLLARS 💀💀💀💀. Knowing damn well that not only is the game severely broken, lacking in mechanics, disproportionately sized from the world to King Kongs model. To the insane fact it's only 3 hours long 😂😂 There's absolutely NO WAY. There's gotta be a alternative motive like you said. Money laundering seems plausible. 1.Create half ass horrible game 2. Severely overprice the heap of burning garbage 3. Launder money through company making it seem as if all the earnings were from the overpriced game and the government is non the wiser 🤷. Honestly if it was a money laundering scheme. It's not a terrible idea tbh lol because the US government or any for that matter constantly ignore the gaming industry...
@@chaoticchaos894 im just wondering why they didnt take the indie route, it'd attract less attention if its the case Either way the gaming industry needs to be investigated, theyve been left to their own devices for too long
Damn they either forgot to flag some of the terrain as walkable or they made it to where you cant walk on a certain steepness of terrain and forgot to make you slide off of it if you do
This is insane, like actually insane, I NEED to know the story behind the development of this game, how does this exist? There is no way this was made by more than 1 person. I can't even wrap my head around it
For me the only insane thing is how they got rights to king kong because the game itself is nothing unusual, just some trash made by some small developer, its not even popular or anything, the only reason they even get talk about is ytbers, now it has whole 36 reviews on steam
@@Dartnittking kong rights have been free to use since like 2021, since its just the book rights, the design doesnt have to look like the previous ones from the movies.
2023 is the only year when you will see soulless cashgrab and absolute masterpiece. When you compare King Kong and Baldur’s Gate 3, you can see the stark difference in philosophy. Kong really is the greatest game of all timelines.
The sheer characterization and personality that comes from every creature in this video game is truly a sight to behold. You can tell that whoever made this game put all of their heart and soul into it and made it with love and pure joy.
What eventually happens is kind of a sunk cost. They put millions into development, then just try and generate some buzz online and hope they sell enough before everyone realizes it’s trash
If someone showed me a screenshot of this game I would not have dreamed of thinking it was a king kong game. How do you make a licensed game and then be so bad that the main character can not be recognized as one of the most popular and famous movie monsters of all time?
“John I’m so sick of you talking about that Kong game we don’t have the money but if it’s going to keep you from whining here’s $1,000 go knock yourself out”
