Genre: First-Person Shooter Number of Players: 1-16
In case you’re new to the world of Turok and wondering what all the fuss has been about since the franchises return was announced, let me fill you in. Turok’s concept has always been brilliant in it’s simplicity. People like shooting things. So Turok has always had some of the best BFGs. (I shouldn’t have to explain that acronym.) Toss in the largest monsters to ever walk the Earth – Dinosaurs, and you have Turok. The success of the series is just that simple. And it’s always worked rather well. With this simple concept passed on to a new developer and publisher, and ten years to advance this franchise, you would think we’d have a great game on our hands. While the new Turok isn’t bad, it does have the stink of over-thinking and poor developing all over it.
Just about every issue I have with Turok can be traced to the core of the title’s gameplay. Touchstone probably thought they had a winner on paper; and rightfully so. Pitching this game had to be easy. Touchstone likely looked at the long campaign, additional online co-op missions and deathmatch, and thought, “WINNER!”. And it looks like a winner till you press [start].
It all starts with the actual combat of Turok – which for some reason is a mix of simplistic Doom style combat and difficult precision aiming. Turok took the Rambo approach to gaming and ensured that you just can’t seem to run out of ammo. The ammo isn’t actually unlimited; it’s just that you can’t walk 10 feet without tripping over a stack of full clips, magazines and weapons caches. The weapon and ammo placement actually appears to be done by someone’s ten year old brother who was told to see how many items he could fit in a map. The reason for this is obviously due to the lack of auto-aiming. So if you’re firing from farther than five feet, you’ll require all that ammo. But don’t worry, there’s likely an entire armory behind the next bush. But no matter how much ammo you have, there’s nothing fun about using two magazines to take down a mid-level enemy.
The next issue comes in the form of stealth, which developer Propaganda Games believes to mean – you’re spotted no matter what. I’m not a ninja. I don’t claim to be stealthy. I couldn’t steal a donut from fat, deaf, and blind guy in a dark room if I had night-vision goggles and twenty foot arms; but this is a videogame. Why does everyone seem to know where I am despite being crouched in the grass and using “stealth” weapons? Did I miss the shower button that removes my position-giving-away stink? I did tend to get away with a few stealth kills each time, but was always discovered within seconds of my second or third kill. All I can think is that someone turned up the AI to “sixth sense” and then walked off laughing at how they ruined a ten year old franchise on the brink of a return.
There is one positive about the game’s stealth aspect. You use the knife in close kills. This ain’t no ordinary knife either. This is the mother of all weapons for some unexplainable reason. If someone asked you what you’d like to have in your hands when facing a pack of raptors, what would you say? Sure you’d like to have a BFG of some sort. After playing Turok though, you may change your answer to knife. That’s because of the aforementioned aiming. It is literally easier to kill a pack of raptors with a knife than a gun. What can you really say about that? The guy who handled the enemy AI must have snuck in and handled the knife too.
This all compliments and contributes to the game being the most unbalanced title of 2008 so far. One minute you’re feeling like the game is overly simple and boring when suddenly a dinosaur attacks you from behind and you get overwhelmed. This also occurs with human enemies who are easy kills one minute and then have comrades backing them up in small platoon numbers the next. The checkpoints appear to have been done as an after thought due to the fact that you’ll see them show up in a sort of rhythm for a while and then you won’t see one for a long while. A positive of the game is the save feature which allows for on-the-fly saving anywhere in the game. The problem, which you knew was coming, is that your save only goes back to the last checkpoint. So what’s the freaking point of having this option?
It’s not all negative though as Turok does actually look good graphically… at times. But even here, the game has it’s share of flaws. Graphical issues like inconsistencies in character textures actually become distracting over time. On more than one occasion, larger enemies would enter the screen and look smooth until their textures loaded and would completely change their appearance from smooth to accurately textured. This is something that has no excuse on the Xbox 360 due to the large amount of RAM provided to store and load these textures. Besides this one major flaw, the graphics seem to have gotten the most polish of the entire game.
Sound wise, Turok is nothing special either. It does seem to do a good job of providing the appropriate ambience with loud and scary dinosaur roars. The voice acting is done well, but just doesn’t impress due to the rest of the game bringing it down.
When it is all said and done, Turok fails to resurrect a great franchise that started back on the Nintendo 64. The saddest thing about it all is that I really wanted to like this game. The original was one of my favorites back in the day, but this re-imagining of the original almost seems to ruin all my fond memories of the Acclaim classic. With all the great shooters on the Xbox 360, Touchstone and Propaganda dropped the ball here with severe inconsistencies in difficulty, graphics, and overall fun. The game is worth a rent, but let Blockbuster and GameFly pay full price. This game isn’t worth your $59.99.
- Propaganda killed Turok even after Acclaim's death
This all compliments and contributes to the game being the most unbalanced title of 2008 so far. One minute you’re feeling like the game is overly simple and boring when suddenly a dinosaur attacks you from behind and you get overwhelmed. This also occurs with human enemies who are easy kills one minute and then have comrades backing them up in small platoon numbers the next. The checkpoints appear to have been done as an after thought due to the fact that you’ll see them show up in a sort of rhythm for a while and then you won’t see one for a long while. A positive of the game is the save feature which allows for on-the-fly saving anywhere in the game. The problem, which you knew was coming, is that your save only goes back to the last checkpoint. So what’s the freaking point of having this option?
Comments (11)
