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As a result of the uncluttered view, you feel like you're there on Skull Island, and this is enhanced by the rich Dolby 5.1 surround sound mix, on par with the best Hollywood action films, and the careful art design and judicious use of shaders on the Xbox 360. The final element to bringing the game to the next stage is the fact that the gun remains holstered most of the time. You must hold down the left trigger to pull out your gun or ready your spear and use the right trigger to attack. Since you can't run when you have your weapon drawed, you spend a good portion of the game with the weapon holstered, ensuring that your hand doesn't block the view of most of the game.

Weapons

Speaking of weapons, there aren't many. You can only carry one gun at any given time and they pretty much are the tried-and-true conventions of a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a rifle. Since the health system doesn't rely on "hit points" you won't have to deal with finding health packs (or equivalent "food"). How can you replenish ammo? Well, it would seem silly to have random boxes of ammo spread out through the jungle. Ubisoft's solution is to have random boxes of ammo spread out through the jungle and then explaining it through the story – these are being dropped by the rescue pilot as you're making your way through the jungle to find a place where he can land.

It turns out that the ammo ends up being extremely scarce and so to maximize the survival experience, the primary weapons you will use are found in the form of spears. These include both man-made spears left by the natives of the island as well as spears that you fashion from the bones left behind from decaying dinosaurs. You can either stab monsters or throw the spear at them.

Survival

One of the main strengths of King Kong the game is that things are genuinely tense. As I mentioned earlier, the art and sound play a substantial role. The sense of survival is fully captured everytime you get ambushed by the giant centipedes or are somehow supposed to distract the "V-Rex" while your colleagues work on opening a door. The game has a definite primal feel to it in that while the creatures will eat you whenever they get a chance, they'll also eat each other when they get a chance. You can try to take down every single potential predator or play it in a stealthier fashion where you distract the predators with some food as your run by and hope to make it to the next stage of the room. If you're lucky, you can let natural selection take care of some of the creatures before you go in. In practice, you'll need a good mix of the strategies. King Kong is a game where there are times that you'll choose not kill everything that moves. This isn't due to some artificial limitation or penalty, but the simple realization that sometimes it's just easier to sneak by. Of course, it's always the predators that you don't see that startle you.