For over a decade, fans of the MonsterVerse had to settle for mobile titles to scratch the gaming itch. Now the franchise breaks new ground, smashing its way onto most major gaming platforms with Kong: Survivor Instinct. Though it offers up an affordable and solid experience, there’s plenty holding this freshman console outing back.

Gameplay

Kong: Survivor Instinct puts the player in the shoes of David Martin. You’ll maneuver David through numerous urban structures, climbing up ledges, crawling through small spaces, and utilizing various tools you find along the way. Massive boxes and barrels that appear to weigh anywhere from 600lbs-2,000lbs can be quickly and easily dragged about to reach high places. Eventually you inexplicably get a grappling hook so you can climb and swing around with it. Sometimes you’ll use a gadget called the Orca Σ to record bio-acoustic signal fragments, and once all parts are collected you’ll be able to progress to the next area. The new Orca also houses map and lore data, so you can keep track of where you’ve been and brush up on collected logs about monsters and other pertinent content. Keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary will often reward you with ammo for weapons, med kits, or upgrades to make you tougher. These enhancements will come in handy as you face off against threats, human and otherwise.

You’ll often encounter villainous humans as you run through the city ruins within the game. Combat is simple, with basic button-mashing combos coupled with a dodge and block mechanic. If you block at the right time you’ll parry your opponent’s attack, leaving them open to a combo of your own. Dodging is primarily for opponents with firearms, who aren’t much of a threat until late in the game when you’re dealing with 4-6 enemies at a time. Then there’s a couple of “Superspecies” you often find blocking your path. The non-human fights are extremely easy, even when playing on Hard difficulty. One well-timed swing will kill them, and if they hop onto you it’s just a matter of mashing a button to throw them off and automatically curb stomp them. If you don’t enjoy the combat, you’ll be doubly irritated as there is no way to escape a battle. Once the game spawns in even one enemy, you can’t go anywhere until they’re dead.

This wouldn’t be a proper MonsterVerse adventure without some Titans, and this game delivers the goods. Along with the titular Kong, you’ll be scrambling in terror from newcomer Abaddon—a freakish giant spider that cocoons a portion of the city in her web, and Tiamat, who spews deadly bile all over the docks. It’s nice that they make full use of these monsters and their special weapons, but the moments when they appear on screen is typically less engaging than the rest of the game. It should be thrilling to be rushing through an office building narrowly avoiding attacks from an angry giant monster, but these sequences pit you in an obstacle course where one mistake will result in failure. The animation on the Titans in these sequences might have been impressive, but I was too busy looking in the foreground. If you want to experience the full thrill of these scenes, you’ll probably need to find a ‘let’s play’ of the game.

The game encourages exploration, and you’ll often have plenty of reason to backtrack. You’ll often reach a new fast travel point, which is denoted by a large ‘X’ being drawn in the environment. It makes travel within one region relatively pain free, but there’s no way to simply load up the beginning area of the game if you wish to revisit it. You’ll need to fast travel to the X nearest to the entrance of ‘Area Y,’ and then once you enter Y, you find to head to ‘Area X,’ and so on until you reach ‘Area A.’ There’s no fast way to do it, and it’s such a chore that few will bother trekking back to find any missed secrets.

Story

The game opens with a cinematic in which our hero David attempts to get in touch with his daughter Stacy. Titans have been drawn to her neighborhood, and they’re going crazy smashing up the place. David decides to head off to rescue his beloved daughter, armed with nothing but his trusty backpack. After a matter of minutes, you encounter some dubious folks getting mowed down by Kong, and take possession of a mysterious device, the previously mentioned Orca Σ. After another few minutes, you come within earshot of the terrorist Alan Jonah. It seems he’s after the Orca, and instead of just ditching it you hold onto it. As a result, you’re constantly hounded by Jonah’s mercenary force, the Hyenas.

The dialog is often weak, and the characters are never interesting. Early on David encounters a man whose daughter has just died. Understandably, he’s drunk and having trouble coping with the horrific pain the loss of his daughter has caused him. So, when he acts a fool and waves a gun around, David shouts at him in disgust and tells him to pull himself together. The performance by the voice actor makes him seem almost sociopathic. This extraordinary lack of sympathy makes David immediately unlikable, and he never does anything that feels especially heroic. He will go on to kill dozens of people throughout the course of the game, and he constantly justifies his actions in a similarly cold fashion. If he just got rid of the Orca Σ he wouldn’t need to be fighting them though, so rather than just finding another way to get to his daughter he chose to steal from violent mercenaries. Seems like he’s looking for trouble to me. I guess it’s worth it so that David can pick up conveniently placed data logs that always seem to introduce characters or creatures that David is about to meet. Why did a random cop car have Alan Jonah’s file in it? What are the odds that you’d happen to find a dossier on Abaddon right around the time you first encounter her, and then the same happens with the Tiamat log?

The game opens to a disclaimer warning players that the story covers heavy scenarios. This, as well as the setup of the game give off the impression that the game is going for a tone similar to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023). The visuals and music match the feel of the Apple TV+ show pretty well too. However, the voice acting brings to mind the goofiest moments of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bad dialog delivered poorly is a about the most devastating thing that could happen to a moody, atmospheric experience, and this game has that in spades.

Perhaps the most glaring issue with the game stems from its placement in the timeline. This game occurs shortly after the events of Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), and Kong is now living in the Hollow Earth. He’s mysteriously been summoned to the surface, and other Titans have joined him in the area. Godzilla, on the other hand, is a complete no-show. In Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire (2024), Godzilla was so furious that Kong had come to the surface that he traveled hundreds of miles to do battle with, and possibly kill, Kong. Yet three Titans running amok in the same place didn’t grab Godzilla’s attention? It just doesn’t make much sense. Nor does the scale of the monsters here, puts the Titans at roughly Showa era proportions. I can’t wait to learn about their fluctuating sizes in the next MonsterVerse tie-in comic.

Graphics

Visually, the game does its job. The camera is far from any characters or environments, so they’re not the most lavishly detailed assets. The look of the wrecked cityscape is suitably bleak. Everything from the crumbling human structures to the organic hazards from the Titans is adequately realized. Even Charles Dance’s likeness is well realized on Alan Jonah’s face. The Titans are a step above the smaller characters and environments, and they look good in motion.

While it’s not a criticism against the quality of the visuals, I often found myself missing certain interactable objects on screen. The spots you can use the grappling hook really blend in, even with the sparkling visual que. I had multiple instances of looking for these grappling hook locations, and then not finding it, then having to backtrack when I eventually checked the map which thankfully shows icons for interactable elements. I’ll take less realism if it means the game is more playable.

Also, there’s an opening and ending cinematic to the game. Any given frame from these cinematics looks good, but the framerate looks jittery. It appears to have some sort of bug that will hopefully be sorted out. Until that fix comes, it leaves a bad impression.

Audio

The score is a pretty good companion to the music from Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023). It has a nice, ominous tone to it that matches the action quite nicely. There aren’t any strong melodic themes that you’ll be humming to yourself, but it always feels appropriate.

The effects all match as well. You’ll hear flame burning, slime oozing, wooden boards clattering. The creatures all come with their authentic snarls and roars. Sometimes when the Titans go to town on the buildings around you there’s some solid moments of sound design.

The voice acting is the big downfall of this game’s audio, though. The leading performance just feels like he had poor direction, not knowing what the game was going for. He never feels genuine throughout the duration of the adventure. The stand-in they got to play as Alan Jonah sounds absolutely nothing like Charles Dance. The various Hyenas have stupid dialog like something out of a cheesy cartoon and never sound like real human beings.

Controls

The game has an easy layout to work with. You can run, jump and crouch. Running and tapping the crouch button makes you slide. Jumping into a ledge makes David grab onto the ledge and hang. From there you can climb up, drop down or kick off the wall and jump away. All movement feels intuitive. Combat is surprisingly responsive, allowing you to cancel out attacks into a block or dodge.

The gun and grappling hook are both tied to the right analog stick. Simply aim with the stick, then fire. I found myself struggling with the grappling hook, but the gun was never an issue. The gun comes with a handy laser sight, and the grappling hook only shows an icon wherever it will be thrown. Perhaps that extra visual indicator of the laser made the difference. Either way, I really dislike using the grappling hook. It’s just so slow.

Replay

Once a file is beaten, then game allows you to reload to the point just before the finale. You can backtrack to your heart’s content and try to find all the collectibles and upgrades. There isn’t a great wealth of stuff to find though, and for some reason you’re locked out from the first area of the game, and you can’t initiate the end of the game on a completed file. So, you needlessly don’t have access to the full map, and you needlessly can’t enjoy the end of the story again without starting a new file.

It would’ve been nice if a chapter select option had been added, or even a cutscene viewer so that you could go back through all the major story beats. As it stands, the game is about 6 hours long and upon beating the game a finished file is basically a place to read lore on the Hyenas and Titans. Hard difficulty doesn’t offer much more challenge than the other settings, and aside from Achievements and Trophies there probably won’t be anything calling you back to the game.

Overall