Worst game of 2023?

IT has been almost two decades since there was a full-fledged King Kong game, but those clamouring for one can now rejoice with the release of Skull Island: Rise of Kong.

That is about where the good news ends, because Rise of Kong not only looks terrible, but the gameplay is also fundamentally atrocious based on everything being posted online.

The last Kong game was Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie.

Released in 2005, the game follows the events in Peter Jackson’s film, with developer Ubisoft splitting the game between first-person and third-person combat, where players would intermittently control Jack Driscoll (played by Adrien Brody in the film) for shooting gameplay and Kong for anything involving melee combat.

On the other hand, this new game is a rather generic, run-of-the-mill brawler game with art direction and graphics that somehow look worse than its ageing predecessor.

Revealed only a few months ago, Rise of Kong was released over the Oct 14 weekend, and players immediately flooded social media with screenshots and gameplay that is quickly cementing the game as the worst game of 2023.

A user by the handle @RickDaSquirrel on X (formerly Twitter) posted a clip of the game on Nintendo Switch showing not only the game’s generic combat between Kong and three crabs but also weird animations where instead of scuttling, the crabs slide during a short scene.

The user also posted another clip where Kong sees a monster and gets a flashback of the same monster, which triggers the giant ape to go into a rage. The problem is that the developer did not bother to animate a real flashback, opting to instead lazily throw a still image on the screen.

On Youtube, content creators such as the MKIceAndFire channel are posting longer videos from Rise of Kong, which is not doing the game any favours either. It is unknown if the developer ran out of time or if the publisher silently pushed the game out after seeing the unsalvageable state it was in.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is available on every console platform and PC, but I would not recommend it, not even for laughs. It is unknown if the developer, IguanaBee, ran out of time or if the publisher silently pushed the game out after seeing the unsalvageable state it was in.