Step aside Gollum, a new King Kong game has come for your viral jank crown
Skull Island: Rise of Kong might just be the greatest thing you’ve ever seen.
While The Lord of the Rings: Gollum looked for a little while like it’d be a unanimous winner of the best game to laugh at with your mates on social media award (unofficial), a new contender has emerged in the form of Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
While it’s set to unlock on Steam later today, hence the fact you won’t find any reviews of it on the platform quite yet, some gameplay clips from the ape-themed adventure have surfaced on Twitter and, well, they’re quite something. For example, if you’re after the chance to assemble some of the best reaction gifs of all time, the game, which is published by GameMill Entertainment, looks like it delivers in spades.
Then again, if I was in Kong’s place and suddenly being confronted by a still image of a dinosaur, which people online originally interpreted as an potential placeholder left in by the devs, but is actually Kong remembering the dinosaur that killed his parents, I suppose I can’t promise that I wouldn't react in the same fashion.
While a lot of attention has been lavished upon the game’s cutscenes, its gameplay hasn’t been excluded from the widespread lampooning, with a sequence that sees Kong battle a giant crab boss called King Dengiz having drawn plenty of criticism.
As you can see above, it is not The Tarnished fighting Malenia, though if you don’t find the bit that sees Kong rip off one of the creature’s armour spikes before flying backwards like he’s in a wind tunnel at least a little bit funny, we can’t be friends.
The clips have prompted some social media users to accuse the game of being “shovelware” or “a complete scam”.
On its website, GameMill states that it has “a proven track record for leveraging the equity of some of the world’s most beloved brands in the $100 billion video game market” and works with developers to “bring to life games that delight die-hard and casual gamers alike”.
We have reached out to GameMill for comment on the viral clips, as well as to try to confirm their legitimacy, and will update this article ASAP if we receive a response.