Turok 2: Seeds of Evil

"A game that is simply far too large, intimidating, and confusing to be fun from start to finish."

As a bone-chilling theme fills a darkening forest, and a slew of arrows are fired at the head of an iguana. The iguana retaliates by blowing the ever-loving hell out of the shooter, and after the screen turns red to symbolize a death from the first person perspective, the cyclopean adventure known as Turok 2 begins. Turok 2 is the immediate sequel to the successful Turok title on the Nintendo 64, a game famous for its violence and gore. Turok 2 is able to take the basic theme of blood and violence from the original title and add more features that are able to enhance the gaming experience exponentially.

Story

The Primagen, a cunning and ruthless alien lifeform capable of destruction beyond words, is sealed away in the Lost Land. His seal remains in tact by five Energy Totems constructed throughout the Lost Land by the Lazarus Concord, but like many of gaming's great villains, the Primagen does not take kindly to being imprisoned. He soon beings manipulating virtually every race in the Lost Land to help free him from his seal by convincing them to destroy the Energy Totems that keep him locked away. It is up to Turok to protect the Energy Totems, irradicate the Primagen's minions, and kill the Primagen itself to restore peace to the Lost Land. It is a simple story, which is necessary considering that First Person Shooters do not require deep, thought-provoking plot lines.

Gameplay

Turok 2 is a First Person Shooter. The entire games takes place from the First Person perspective, and everything about the game is colossal. The levels are enormous, the enemies are legion, and the tasks that Turok must complete require a thorough examination of every area within every level of the game. And therein lies the problem with the game.

The game is simply too large for its own good. There are six total levels to explore within the game, and each of them can take hours to complete. Aside from the standard task of going through each level and saving the Energy Totem from being destroyed, you are given mission objectives to complete along the way as well. These objectives almost always involve meticulously searching through each and every level with utmost care, and the game eventually suffers as a result.

For example, the very first level of the game calls for you to activate three Distress Beacons and rescue four children. If you miss anything while searching through the level in an effort to complete these objectives, you are forced to go back to the beginning of the level and continue to go through it until you manage to fulfill the requirements. Given the fact that many of the enemies respawn, the fact that the levels in this game take forever to go through, and the fact that finding everything isn't the easiest task in the world, you can be left going through each level in the game multiple times before finally managing to clear all of the objectives. Many of the necessary locations are hidden in the most nefarious of areas, but you must find them if you wish to complete the game.

The detective work does not end there, either. Along with the mission objectives, there are a host of items that need to be found in order to finish the game. In order to access the later levels of the game, you must find level keys and unlock the pathways leading to the levels. To unlock the final boss battle in the game, you must find six Primagen Keys, and in order to find those keys, you must unlock all of the special abilities in the game. To do that, you must find all six Eagle Feathers in the game and offer them to the spirits of the Lost Land. In short, the game plays as more of a fetch quest than it does a First Person Shooter.

As for the FPS element of the game, this is not without its problems either despite being the game's main strength. The controls, while somewhat difficult to get used to, are actually rather simple. The four C buttons are used to move, while the analog stick is used to aim. This can be confusing at first, but after getting the hang of this control style, you are far more precise in your aim than in other FPS titles. Switching weapons is simple as well. Holding down the A button brings up the eight low class weapons, and from there, all it takes to choose a weapon is to point the analog stick in the direction of the desired weapon. For the high class weapons, all it takes is to hold the B button. The R button jumps, the Z button shoots, and the D Pad is used for sniper and crouching functions. The controls are intimidating at first, but become second nature after a little while.

The controls, however, are not the problem. The problems with the game come from level design and the enemies themselves. First off, there are far too many deathtraps in the game. Lava, bottomless pits, the River of Souls, quicksand, and lasers can all cause instant death, and they are all over the place. Because of this, the game is more a test of how well you can control Turok rather than your skill in defeating the enemies. And this is only when dealing with the deathtraps themselves. There are other examples of the game being more of a control test than an FPS, including jumping across spinning platforms, jumping onto ladders that are placed in difficult spots, swimming, and jumping onto platforms suspended in difficult places. Most of the game feels more like an obstacle course than an FPS, which takes away from the overall gaming experience.

As for the enemies themselves, they are simply too perfect. Every enemy in the game has 100% accuracy with their projectile attacks. Whether they're throwing a grenade or firing lasers at you, practically every single attack that is let loose upon you is guaranteed to hit you if you stand still; consequently, the speed of the enemy projectiles makes them very difficult to avoid unless you have perfect evasion skills, and even with perfect evasion skills, some attacks are literally impossible to avoid. This tends to force you to use a lot of stealth and cheap tactics in order to take down the enemies, which is yet another issue that takes away from the game's overall experience.

The gameplay, despite having occasional flashes of brilliance, is little more than a gigantic mess of features that simply do not blend well with one another. There is too much searching to be done, too many ridiculous movement tasks that you must force Turok to complete, too high a difficulty in taking down the game's enemies, and because of the mammoth amounts of items that must be found in the game, you are forced to go through each level of the game at least twice assuming you're able to complete every objective on your first try. At times, it feels like the game worries too much about the violence and not enough about producing a good, well-rounded product.

Graphics

Even by today's standards, the graphics of the game are amazing. Great detail is put into the enemies, and each level is given a world all its own. The game's big selling point is its violence, and the game does not disappoint. The enemies are given very graphic, animated death scenes in which you can see internal organs, bones, heads severed from bodies, and explosions of blood that cover the entire screen. There is one death scene in which an enemy blows himself up into a million chunks of skin and bone in an effort to damage you. The graphical detail is also adaptive to the weapon with which you are using. Killing an enemy with a Proximity Mine will yield a different death scene than simply blowing off an enemy's head with an explosive shotgun shell, and good detail is given to every case equally.

But there is one key area that suffers due to one feature being given too much attention. When a lot of enemies are close to you, the game slows down dramatically. This makes normal fights far more difficult than they should be, and difficult fights even harder. And while the graphics are very good overall, taking far more damage than necessary due to game slowdowns is nothing short of nerve-wracking.

Music

This is, by far, the best area of the game. Not one single track is subpar; on the contrary, the music in the game is exceptional. You can feel how demonic the River of Souls is simply by listening to the music. You can feel how intense the Hive of the Mantids is simply by listening to the music. You can feel how dark and mysterious the Lair of the Blind Ones is simply by listening to the music. Very rarely does a game's music deliver a game's mood so perfectly as Turok 2 does, and the quality of the game's music is shocking. You find yourself listening to a mellow introduction one minute, and then three seconds later, the game's score just beats the hell out of you with solid instrumentals and an intensity that is nothing short of perfect. Take a few minutes at the beginning of each level and experience it for yourself; you will not be disappointed.

Overall

Turok 2, while having a fair share of positives, is far outweighed by its cons. The game is difficult, but this is due to poor design more than anything else; because of this, the game can wind up being longer than some RPGs. Size does matter, and Turok 2 is the perfect personification as to why. Because of how large the game is and the game's nature of forcing you to find every single thing in order to finish it, Turok 2's novelty wears off fast.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/03/04