Kong: Survivor Instinct – PS5 Review

From Kraków-based developer 7Levels comes an official Monsterverse tie-in, in this case Kong: Survivor Instinct. Were it not for the fact that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire had released in March this year, we’d suspect that it was attempting to hype up a forthcoming film. It does feature several of the monsters as featured in the recent films at least, the titular Kong as well as Tiamat among others.

Practically KSI, if you’ll forgive us for the terrible Sidemen reference, is a 2.5D Metroidvania with occasional outbreaks of combat in between the light puzzling to find your way to all the collectibles on offer. You won’t see much of the gargantuan monsters outside them running around in the background and your player character cowering as they approach and glower in your general direction. We were reminded of 360 era zombie platformer Deadlight at the outset in terms of the abandoned cityscape.

Your single-minded aim is to find your daughter above all else, doing everything you can to find her. Even if it means going on a rampage and taking everyone else out in the process. The plot loosely ties in with the recent films, but is generally forgettable. Though the grumbling by your player character makes the main twist, such as it is, obvious from fairly early on.

Early on you find the deus ex machina of the piece, a handset that allows you seek out audio snippets of the titans as well as serving as your map. Merely being in possession of said doohickey is enough for every enemy to zero in on you. Think the shop keeper from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening or Spelunky writ large, only a shade more persistent.

The audio snippets you detect then need to be resequenced to summon a titan who’ll typically smash up an obstacle or face off against another titan. It’s very much a concession to videogames, but why not use pheromone markers instead? A bit more realistic than an arbitrarily placed sound that happens to be lingering anyway.

Combat is fun enough but a little frustrating due to the fact that once an encounter begins, you’ve no option but to see it out. To begin with you will only face off against one or two enemies, but after a while you’ll be facing multiple enemies, some of whom have guns. You’ll also face off against ninja sorts, though other than being a bit quicker, they’re easy enough to dispatch.

To begin with you’ll just have to see enemies off with melee attacks, though as you progress you’ll gain access to a pistol for ranged attacks and a hammer for heavy attacks. Said hammer can also be used to smash weak floors in as well as padlocks off doors. The pistol is also used to shoot out electrical distribution boxes and stop associated hazards. As well as distribution boxes you’ll find generators that can either be simply switched off, or pulled out like a giant rackmount server blade.

As well as electrical hazards, you’ll encounter fire and toxic areas that are as hazardous to you as they are enemies. You can also push enemies off ledges as well as into each other. They take some damage from the latter option, but falls are fatal.

Annoyingly, during combat, enemies can duck to let enemies behind them fire their guns at you. You can shoot back, but you can’t duck like they do. You can initiate a melee attack or dodge if you time it correctly. The melee attack leads to the hapless victim standing up, taking damage from you and also their ally who’s trying to shoot you. You can also damage enemies with explosions from conveniently placed explosive barrels, though these also hurt you. You can use first aid kits at least.

As you progress through Kong you’ll have to find your way through labyrinthine buildings in your search for Stacy, your daughter. You can either smash your way through obstacles or break locks by shooting them off at the outset. You’ll get access to a hammer and a grapple as you proceed through the story, though there’s a nice little workaround that the devs factored in. In the event you don’t have any ammunition, you’ll be gifted a pistol round so you don’t come unstuck by being unable to open a lock.

As well as mechanical locks, you’ll also need to find keys and spare parts to unlock doors and repair electrical mechanisms, though you’ll generally not have too much trouble finding them.

The comprehensive map shows you objects of interest, including areas that you’ve yet to uncover. You can also move around quickly to areas you’ve previously passed by travelling between waypoints, marked with a big white X. It makes retreading areas where you’ve potentially missed a collectible, and hence the associated trophy, a bit easier. While we managed to get the trophy for all collectibles, we didn’t manage to uncover every room. So began our exhaustive retreading process.

We mentioned combat earlier, but beyond the initial encounters once you’ve encountered the heavier enemies with shields and shotguns, you’ve seen all there is to be seen in terms of combat encounters. There’s no boss fights in the conventional sense as you might expect from a typical Metroidvania, more set pieces where the titans smash buildings up as you race through them.

The first features yer man Kong and sets the tone for the others that follow. That being a gauntlet that you have to run through, stumble or mess up a jump and you’ll probably die. This isn’t so bad on the shorter early encounters, but the latter two are hamstrung by miserly checkpointing. Mess up later in a run, you’ll start from the very beginning. This is exacerbated by the grappling hook being fussy in terms of placement too. Not to mention the final encounter before you reach the end game. If you decide you’ve had enough as we did, you’ll have to do a six-segment sound resequencing minigame again as the prior checkpoint was placed before it.

The end sequence of the game comes to a fairly abrupt conclusion, with what could have been an opportunity to escape from death by drowning reduced to a cutscene and what we see as potentially setting up a follow up to Kong: Survivor Instinct. It’s then down to you to revisit areas and mop any trophies that remain, though two grappling hook trophies are missable if you don’t get them on the way through.

In conclusion, Kong: Survivor Instinct is a solid, if very linear, Metroidvania, let down only a little by combat that doesn’t really evolve beyond promising beginnings. Some of the checkpointing is a bit mean, especially during the titan encounters but we still enjoyed ourselves for the most part. Don’t expect monsters everywhere, your main antagonists are other humans, with the return of a villain played by Charles Dance in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.