by: Steve Simons

February 26, 2008

I have been a fan of the Turok series since I read the first preview in the now dead magazine Game Players. Back then we thought the insane fog hiding everything ten feet in front of your face was there for atmosphere. Not just to hide the fact that the N64 couldn’t handle everything the game was throwing at it. Turok 2 was an intense shooter with some of the coolest weapons to ever grace a video game. How could you not fall in love with the Cerebral Bore? Then things started to just fall apart. We were graced with the multiplayer centric Rage Wars which used the Turok 2 engine and game play systems to deliver some fairly decent multiplayer action. However, the developers admitted the entire Rage Wars game was suppose to ship with Turok 2 but they just didn’t have time to finish it, so we had to buy it separate for full price. Turok 3 shipped not even a full year later with mixed reviews. It just didn’t feel like Turok and the terrible frame rate didn’t do much to help it along. To make matters worse we then found out Acclaim was shelving the franchise. I suppose a couple years later and a new generation of consoles forced them to change their mind, so they released Turok Evolution for Xbox and PS2 and we all thought was the final nail in Turok’s gaming coffin.

Enter Turok and a new direction for the series on a new generation of consoles. Now you are Joseph Turok, an American Indian in the future. Turok has always been a man’s man, however, he’s no longer the true lone wolf; he is instead a military man and a member of the Elite Special Forces division of the now common Space Marines. The game is billed as Epic in scope and story, but I don’t think I would go that far.

I will keep the spoilers as light as possible here, I don’t want to ruin what little story there is. Suffice to say you have betrayed your former team named Wolfpack and you now run with a crew called Whiskey Company. Your current assignment is to hunt down your former leader Roland Kane who has set up base on a remote planet that just happens to be populated by dinosaurs, the very same that used to populate earth. On your way to the planet you get shot down and crash in a dense jungle. Your mission quickly changes and you go from being the hunter to the food for a totally different kind of hunter. From that point on the story makes less and less sense. It will ask questions and not give answers. It will give answers without questions and it will just drop some elements of the story altogether.

Right off the bat you will notice there are some odd game play issues. It almost reminds you of Doom where you have the 1 or 2 trusty weapons and you see no reason to use the rest of your arsenal. You can hold up to 4 weapons, not including your knife and bow. Since Halo, the limit on how many weapons you can hold has been used as a (great) way to up the difficulty level. The system forced you to learn what weapons are good for certain situations and also how to properly limit how much ammo you use. It creates tension and you know something big is just around the corner and you need the right tool to take it down before it does the same to you. The first big issue is the knife. It’s an instant kill weapon with just about every dinosaur you fight in this game. You can take down a pack of Raptors in seconds with some properly timed pulling of the right trigger. You never need to worry about shooting them and wasting your near unlimited supply of ammo. Nor do you ever need to worry about headshots or missing a fast moving target. All you need to do is stand still and wait for them to get into your range and stab them. When you pull the trigger a scripted animation runs. Now don’t get me wrong, they are cool to watch however you could literally see the same one 10 times in the course of 1 minute of game play. With so many close encounters with vicious dinosaurs you probably would expect to get some kind of injury, but after the first couple encounters you will have the timing down. Even though the knife is more powerful then the almighty Halo 1 pistol you will still want to be using the guns. There are some pretty cool ones in the game, and using them has always been a huge part of what made past Turok’s great. There aren’t as many if any mind-blowing gun like there used to be but dual wielding almost anything is still pretty cool. Each weapon also has an alternate fire mode, some of which are very effective while others are just not necessary. The one major gripe with the guns, aside from the constant supply of ammo, is that they seem underpowered. While your knife will kill anything in 1 hit, it seems bullets aren’t made of lead so much as Nerf foam. Unless you are scoring headshots you will empty a ton of ammo to bring down a single guy or dinosaur for that matter. Turok’s trusty bow has made its return and as long as you hold the trigger long enough, no matter where you hit a human enemy they will die in 1 shot. Hold it too long and it will fire by itself, no matter how many steroid injections Turok takes his bitty fingers still get sore sometimes. Some dinosaurs will also die with 1 arrow, but who cares when you have the titanium knife of doom?