This is going to sound weird because I am going to praise Turok 2 for many things and then say how I didn’t like it overall. It has great combat; a great selection of weapons; good sound effects and graphics for it’s time; has a great story and is a fantastic port. The level design though has to be some of the worst I have ever had to play through. It is bad enough that I stopped playing the game because I found it like a frustrating maze even though it has a map system and large exclamation points showing where you need to go. While it shows where you need to go getting there is a series of guesses and trial and error while the map system is useless because it highlights nothing. I swear it was designed this way on purpose just to sell strategy guides. This is not something Nightdive could fix, it just is part of the game. The sad thing is that as far as single player games go this is easily the best Turok game I have played from a game play standpoint. It was much improved over the original and better than the sequels but I got tired of trying to figure out where it wanted me to go.
I played Turok 2 on Linux. It never crashed on me. There were a plethora of graphics options including 2 AA settings; 5 AF settings; an FOV slider that went from 45-120; a resolution scaler that goes from 10-125 %; and 15 other graphics options to tweak. You can manually save whenever you want and there are 16 save slots. You can’t change the difficulty after starting a game. There is a 60 FPS cap. Alt-Tab didn’t work. Performance was great but given the age of the graphics this was to be expected.
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 684 MB
Save System: Manual (any time)
Graphics Settings Used: 16x AF; SMAA; SSAO; all options aside from motion blur on; 1080P at 125% scale
GPU Usage: 0-96 %
VRAM Usage: 681-737 MB
CPU Usage: 10-12 %
RAM Usage: 2.6-2.7 GB
Frame Rate: 56-60 FPS
I commend Nightdive Studios for their work on updating graphics settings and making the Linux port but I had forgotten how terrible the level design was and it sapped any enjoyment I had. I got this game free from a friend but I can’t recommend it at any price. I played for 6 hours before tapping out.
My Score: 5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.0.3 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.0.5 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.12.2-1-MANJARO