I never played the original Turok much, but did play Turok 2 quite a bit and I found it brilliant. The graphics were awesome for the time and the universe it was set in was brilliant, you had a native American taken out of his tribe to fight mutant dinosaurs with space ships and a massive evil overlord. Not to mention very varied weapons that were a lot of fun.

Press whatever not to die

The new Turok couldn’t be a bigger disappointment, I’ve not played very far, but I’ve played enough to know I’m not going to play any further. For a start; any imagination and flair in the storyline has been replaced with bland copy and paste stellar marine type crap, sure you’re a native American called Turok and there’s dinosaurs but beyond that it’s just another sci-fi romp.

Graphics wise the game looks clunky, I had to strain to make sure I wasn’t playing Unreal 2, some of the dinosaurs looked nice but even then they couldn’t seem to animate themselves across the floor without sliding around, helicopters zipped up and down like they ignored the laws of physics and there was something about character animation that just wasn’t right…

And the third strike… You guessed it, a boring and confusing weapon system, you seemed only to be able to carry a limited set of weapons and the game likes to make you dual wield, which isn’t such a problem until you come to pick up another gun and the prompts telling you which button to press to pick up which weapon can get a little confusing. The weapons are the usual pistol, shotgun, rifle etcetera… Yawn.

When actually playing game you’ve got to either have overdosed on coffee or some kind of drugs cocktail because the dinosaurs in this game jump about the screen like schizophrenic spider monkeys on pro plus. Aim assist would have been a welcome bonus here. I found it quite hard to hit some of the dinos because either there were so many of them, they were so small, they were moving too fast or all of the above. You’ve also got to remember that they’re close range and trying to bite/claw you, with no melee button you’ve just got to go crazy on the pad and it feels like such a futile effort.

Ugly is the new beautiful

I’m sure none of you will be glad to know that QUICK TIME EVENTS make an appearance in the game too, and it’s not even a small appearance. Half the time when a dinosaur gets close to you he’ll jump all over you and you have to press or wiggle any number of buttons or sticks which it deems appropriate. Yawn!

An honourable mention has to go to the great achievements distribution too, unlike most games which reward you for completing each mission, giving you a steady rise of gamerpoints so you can at least gauge your completion and if like me you hated the game at least get some gamer points out of it. However, Turok gives you a grand total of 40 gamerpoints for completing the game and all at the end, there are some for killing things in certain ways and some for “co-op map #” but it’s never explained what a “co-op” map is!!?? Most of the gamerpoints are multiplayer related and no-one wants to play that…

oh wait, I almost forgot, HAVING NPC DINOSAURS IN MULTIPLAYER MAPS WAS THE WORST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF BAD IDEAS!! /phew

In closing; Turok is a dog of a game, don’t bloody touch it!