Turok

"Astonishingly Average."

When I first played Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Nintendo 64 in my youth, I couldn't have been more thrilled. The game had everything that a young boy could possibly want, massively destructive weapons, an astonishing environment, and most importantly: dinosaurs. I was enthralled, I couldn't stop playing the game. It's probably because of this, that I was so pleased when I saw that they were making a new game. I immediately picked the game up, and set to work on it right away. After about a day, I put it back on the shelf. I was terribly disappointed, had one of my favorite childhood games really turned out so poorly? About 6 months later, I gave the game another shot. I ended up beating the campaign, and had a bit of fun with the multiplayer. All in all, I was still disappointed.

Gameplay- 6/10
At a glance, the game play in Turok looks to be rather enjoyable. You can execute very graphic knife kills, there are plenty of cool guns, and it's very easy to get the hang of. After a while, you'll start to notice how flawed it really is. For a shooting game, it's really rather hard to shoot anything in Turok. The aimer is incredibly clunky, I found myself having to turn the sensitivity up all the way, and still feeling that I couldn't really hit anything accurately. Knife kills are automatic one hit kills, all you have to do is hit a button as a prompt appears on the screen. You can't miss with the knife, and most players online use it exclusively. Even on the normal difficulty settings, monsters take an obscene amount of bullets to kill. Each weapon has a secondary fire on it, which in most cases is more or less useless.

Online play is an entirely different train wreck. Finding a game takes a ridiculous amount of time, and when you finally get into the game, it's often unbearably laggy. Many of the players online use exclusively the knife, meaning that most fights just turn into two players dancing around each other waiting for an icon to pop up on the screen. In total, there are only about five online maps. You'll often spend many games in a row playing the same map. The game has most of the standard game modes: Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Free for All. It also has some interesting variations on the classics including an objective based game called war games, and a round based version of capture the flag called Assault CTF. There's no option to choose which game mode you play, and it's very difficult to party up with your friends.

Story- 3/10
The story in this game seems like something out of a bad sci-fi thriller. Turok and his military company are sent to a strange planet to find Turok's old master, Kane. As they approach the planet, they are attacked by Kane's men and their ship is shot down. Turok and his men find themselves on a strange planet, infested with dinosaurs. You spend the rest of the game attempting to fight off the dinosaurs, reunite with your company, and eventually find Kane. The story seems very corny, and is incredibly dull to play through. The few plot twists are very easy to see coming, and don't really add much to the story.

Graphics- 7/10
This is the area where Turok really shines. The jungle-like environment you're thrust into look quite good. You can see the grass moving when a dinosaur approaches, and the physics of the game seem to be relatively sound. The characters themselves look a little cartoony. All of the characters have gigantic biceps, some sort of scar, or an eye patch to make them look tough. The animations, especially those of the knife kills, look great. Very gory, and very enjoyable to see over and over again. Cut scenes are rather weak, and don't really work to enhance the story. All in all, the game does a good job of creating a futuristic jungle environment that really pleases the eye.

Replayability- 4/10
With the especially weak story, Turok isn't a great game to play over and over. The online doesn't add much to the game, with lag making it at times unplayable. Playing the campaign more than once is incredibly arduous. The game does offer an Inhuman mode, which ups the difficulty to an almost unreasonable level. The achievements in this game are quite a pain to get, for those who are interested. Very few of them are story based, and the online ones are mostly very difficult. All things considered, not a great game to play more than once.

Overall- 5/10
Overall, Turok was a relatively disappointing game. It combines weak online with a very boring story in order to create a game that you really CAN afford to miss. It looks good graphically, and the voice acting is wonderful, but that doesn't do enough to save the game. Despite the great fun of the earlier games, this new addition to the series is definitely not worth buying.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/08/08

Game Release: Turok (US, 02/05/08)