Turok is a bad game. I’ll be honest with you from the start. Don’t buy this game. There are a lot of problems with this title, many too insignificant to mention. But they stack up. But before that, let’s look at what Turok gets right.
Dinosaurs! There are many varieties, ranging from small wall crawlers, to raptors, to the behemoth T-Rex’s. All of them, without exception, are extremely well-made. They behave as you would expect, there is no real ‘game’ behavior for them, they just eat everything that moves. They are also neutral in terms of who they will attack, making for some incredibly interesting three-way fights between you, them, and the enemy soldiers. You can use them to your advantage, or be beholden to their will when things go bad. The bottom line though, is that they are freakin’ cool.
Other than the terrible lizards, though, Turok has many, many problems. Its biggest problem is the knife. In Halo, a melee kill was not only a hard-to-perform attack, forcing you to rush close to an enemy, exposing yourself, but also a gratifying and satisfying way to complete combat, even more so with the one-hit KO from behind. In Turok, you have the knife. It kills anything. And I really mean anything. And the most annoying part is that you use it all the time in exactly the same way. The way in which nearly every single enemy dinosaur in the game will just lunge on you, triggering quick timing events, forcing you to use the knife to slash them up, is interesting. But the game is relentless in forcing this exact same situation upon you.
Instead of using the dinosaurs to your advantage as the game hopes you do, you end up just mowing them down like everything else - just to stop them turning on you and performing the same attack animation for the thousandth time, and making you cut their jaws or stab their neck in the exact same manner as you’ve always done. To say it is repetitive would be understating just how annoying this process becomes. It’s a gigantic missed opportunity which unfortunately turns the rest of the game into a linear, run and gun (almost on rails) shooter.
This is worsened by nearly the entire game being indoors, set in homogeneous generic ‘space base’ architecture. If you have ever played a first person shooter before, you have been in these corridors many times. However, the cramped environments offered here do provide tense and thrilling combat. The only problem is that there are entire sections of this game that could be from any FPS game. This is reminiscent of F.E.A.R. in that you spend hours in the exact same office warehouse. But while you are there, you are enjoying the combat. The same can be said here. It could be better, but it could be a lot worse. Turok then is a game that will be remembered as almost achieving greatness. There is some real talent at work on this game, that much is clear. There are moments of genius, some genuinely excellent concepts and the best implementation of dinosaurs into a game since, well… ever.
Where it falls down though, is that it has too much ‘filler’ material. Preposterous stealth sections with stupid enemy AI that become frustrating on levels you can’t imagine are punctuated by moments when the whole system works beautifully, allowing you to cheer as you cleverly pick off an enemy with the bow from a hidden position. There are also far too many generic space marine soldiers and far too few of the vastly more interesting dinosaurs. I’m not suggesting they turn the game into some kind of raptor safari, but definitely push the most appealing aspect of the franchise a little more than this.
All in all, Turok is a missed opportunity, full of too many examples of bad game design and poor engineering. That said, it is not without value, showing some moments of genius among the chaff. Don’t buy this game. Rent it. It’s enjoyable while it lasts, and worth the cash for the few good moments it has.
