Congo The Movie: The Lost City of Zinj
Sega Saturn
Nostalgia Factor:
The movie Congo has always been a guilty pleasure of mine. Everyone loves to hate on this movie and say how awful they think it is, but you know what? I like it. It's fast paced, it's fun, it's funny (stop eating my sesame cake!!), and it's got some adrenaline pumping action sequences in it. Sure, it's no cinematic masterpiece, but if you take it for what it is - a goofy popcorn adventure movie - it really is quite entertaining.
Being such a fan of the movie, I was really excited to play this game when it first came out. I scraped together my hard-earned allowance money and paid full price for this bad boy. I expected something along the lines of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D, but with a jungle setting. Wow, I couldn't have been more disappointed when I first turned this on. The controls were choppy, the graphics were a hot mess, and I thought the game was an absolute disaster that I immediately regretted buying.
Over time I came to mildly like the game, but I never loved it. I beat the game a couple of times before I ended up putting it in a storage bin, where it sat idly for a good 20 something years.
When I started writing game reviews for my blog, I knew eventually I'd have to dig up Congo and play it again from beginning to end. It is my goal to play through and review every game in my collection, after all. But I was dreading that prospect. I remembered how much this game had let me down when I was a kid. I had read all the negative online reviews where people were bashing it as one of the worst Saturn games out there. I also remembered it being fairly difficult, and my Saturn has lost its ability to save game progress anymore. I knew I would have to beat the game in one sitting, and honestly that was a very daunting prospect for me.
But here I am. I beat the game. I'm writing this review. It's over. Is Congo The Movie: The Lost City of Zinj as bad as all the online reviews, and my memory, indicate? Read on and find out.
Story:
This game's story is as basic as they come. You play as the lone survivor of the original doomed Travicom expedition from the movie. Your goal is to continue the expedition, collect as many diamonds as you can, and return home.
Gameplay:
I would say that this game's controls are really showing their age, but to be honest they were never very good to begin with. Your character is slow-moving. Turning is a herky-jerky and choppy affair. Trying to navigate your character through jungle passages is like trying to steer the Titanic through a narrow corridor of water. You're going to "run ashore" by going off the path and going up into the bushes more times than you can count. You're going to get disoriented. You're going to lose track of where you are. You're going to get hit by enemies and have absolutely NO idea what is hitting you. It takes you a good ten seconds to rotate your character in every direction, which only adds to the frustration level. There is a very steep, punishing learning curve just learning how to move your character that you must conquer if you want to succeed at this game. It's no wonder that most YouTube playthroughs of Congo don't extend past the first couple levels of the game.
Jumping can be a frustrating affair as well. You don't need to jump a whole lot in the first half of the game, but towards the end you have to jump from platform to platform over giant pools of lava with pinpoint precision. Due to the game's sloppy controls, I ended up falling more times than I care to admit. It got quite frustrating the more I played and the more I failed.
Combat isn't much better. Your weapon fires at a very slow rate. Ammo can be hard to come by and I was finding myself running out quite often. I do like that there is an auto-aim feature, because the overall shoddiness of this game's controls would otherwise make it extremely difficult, almost impossible, to line up your shots properly.
There isn't a huge variety of weapons in this game, but what you are given is good enough to suffice. You get a handgun, a shotgun, a machine gun, a rocket launcher, and a diamond-fueled laser gun that you pick up in the later stages of the game.
Most stages consist of simply making it from your starting point to a satellite dish at the end of the stage. Do that, and you move on to the next stage. Conceivably, you could just run past all enemies straight to the satellite dish in most of these levels. What stops you from doing this are the hordes and hordes of creatures in your way. You'll be walking along, minding your own business, when all of a sudden a giant gaggle of spiders will run out of the jungle and swarm you. Poisonous butterflies do the same. So do the game's "main" enemies, the gorillas.
You can't just run past these enemies, as you get stuck and caught up on them if you come into contact with them. You can try, but be warned that you might get surrounded on all sides if you try to do this, constantly taking damage with no way to move your character. So really, if you want to make things easier on yourself, you'll back off and clear out your enemies before moving on.
I do have to give Congo credit for trying some new things. In one stage, a giant earthquake rolls through every 45 seconds or so, (picture the wave at a baseball game) tossing your character up into the air and dropping him down with a satisfying oomph. You must use this earthquake to your advantage to get over an otherwise impenetrable wall to collect an item you need to advance to the next stage. Your character can also get poisoned, which reverses the game's control scheme on the D-pad until the poison is cured.
Level layouts start off pretty basic, but improve as the game goes on. The first few stages have you running through a generic jungle setting, fighting enemies, collecting diamonds, and making it to the satellite dish at the end of each stage. The earthquake stage is the first one with any puzzle-solving elements, as it has you collecting artifacts to unlock a gate which leads into the Lost City of Zinj. Zinj itself is pretty cool, as you find yourself exploring ancient ruins, flipping switches, avoiding booby traps, and going into combat with the city's defenses.
The most enjoyable stages for me, however, were the cave stages towards the end of the game. I liked going through the dark, fighting spiders and exploring every nook and cranny of the cave system. The level where you enter into some kind of "colosseum" battle with the apes was a fun challenge. So was the underground river with all the poisonous snakes. And as much as the platform jumping over lava pits irritated me, these stages were very challenging and gave me a strong sense of pride, like YEAH I DID IT!!! whenever I would make it through a particularly tough segment.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Congo's save system. It's the weirdest save system I've seen in any game, period. If you die, you are given the option to either continue playing, which costs you a life, or quit to the title screen and restart the level. If you choose the former, your game data is deleted when you get down to zero lives and you have to start the whole game from the beginning all over again. Going the second route is the safer way to go, but having to restart each level from the beginning whenever you die is a major pain in the arse. I don't know what they were thinking when they came up with this idea.
Graphics:
I would say Congo's graphics are a mixed bag, but really they are mainly poor. Everywhere you look you'll find rough and grainy surfaces and heavily pixelated flora and fauna. Some of the enemies you encounter are just an absolute joke to look at.
The jungle section of the game is particularly rough, as all the leaves, trees, and bushes around you disintegrate into blobs of ugly pixels when you get too close to them. When you get deeper into the game and the action shifts indoors, things start to look a lot better. The textures are still crap, but it feels like things are more basic and they aren't trying to "do too much" with making things look fancy (and failing in the process).
Sound:
Congo's music and sound effects are decent but nothing spectacular. I expected some of the more memorable tracks from the movie to make their appearance in the game, but they never do. Instead you get a bunch of boring and uninspiring jungle beats.
Sound effects are alright. Your weapons sound... fine when you fire them. I really wish your enemies made some kind of noise when they approached you, but they don't. This, along with the game's questionable graphics and controls, can lead to some fairly disorienting moments as you play.
One thing I do enjoy is the atmosphere the game creates in some of the later levels. The haunting music that plays as you explore the City of Zinj and the diamond mines fits the grim mood of the levels perfectly.
Overall:
As flawed as this game is and as much as I hated it when I initially fired it up, I ended up kind of liking it by the time I finished it. Not to say I am a big fan of the game or that I will ever play it again in my life, but it wasn't HORRIBLE. Some spots were super rough while others were somewhat enjoyable.
I definitely disagree with all the reviews that call Congo a steaming pile of garbage and an absolute abomination. Let's be real, the game is bad but it is not THAT bad. I've played much, much worse. It definitely does not deserve to go down as one of the worst video games of all time.
Would I recommend Congo to a friend? No. Would I recommend it to someone who likes the movie? Probably not. I know this game isn't for everyone. I know it is a very, very mixed bag. But if you are patient enough to make it through the first few stages, you'll discover that there is some fun to be had with this title. Or you won't, and you'll still think it is garbage. I can't even disagree with that. I would totally be okay with you trashing the game because I can totally see where you are coming from.
But me? I had a decent time with this. Kind of. Maybe.
Final Score:
D+
And just like that, I don't have any more physical copies of Saturn games to review! I've reviewed every single Saturn game in my collection, with the exception of one: the original Panzer Dragoon that is an unlockable feature for Panzer Dragoon Orta on the Xbox. I can pack up my Saturn and all my games and put them into storage where I don't have to worry about them getting lost or damaged anymore. Since I started writing this blog back in 2015, this is the first system I've played and reviewed every single game I own 100%. Yay me!
All my other Saturn reviews:
