Peter Jackson's King Kong - The Official Game of the Movie

Most movie tie-ins of 2005 were built to a deadline and a licensing checklist. This one was shaped by Michel Ancel, the designer behind Rayman, and it shows in a single stubborn decision: there is no heads-up display. No health bar, no ammo counter, no objective arrow. The screen is just the island, and you have to read the damage on the character and the trouble in the foliage.

You spend most of the game as Jack Driscoll, the screenwriter, in first person. Skull Island is hostile in a way the game takes seriously. Weapons are scarce and ammunition is rationed, so spears, a few firearms and the environment itself matter. Sometimes the right answer is to hide, or to let a creature pass. Crew members travel with you, and you can direct them in simple ways. The tension that results is real, if unevenly maintained, because the same scarcity that makes an encounter tense also makes some stretches feel like fumbling in the dark.

The other half is Kong, played in third person. Here the game becomes a brawler about weight and grip. You climb, swing, throw and tear, and the big fights against V-Rexes are the high points, with the camera and the controls working to make Kong feel huge rather than agile. Protecting Ann Darrow is folded into the action, which gives those sequences a purpose beyond smashing things. They are also frequently better than the human sections, which is an odd verdict for a game that spends so much time on Jack.

It has aged unevenly. The missing interface is bold, but it can slide into vagueness, and the shooting is stiff by later standards. The PS2 version also shows the hardware straining under dense jungle and large creatures, with softer visuals than the other consoles managed. Still, the sound design and the film's score carry a great deal of atmosphere, and the game keeps its nerve about what it wants to be.

What survives is the ambition. A licensed game that trusts the player to feel their way through a hostile place was rare then and remains rare now, and its best minutes belong to an ape the size of a building.