It's like they took what was fun about Unreal III and slapped the Turok name on it. This is a bad thing why?
But with the latest title release I was indeed as skeptical as anyone else knowing Turoks past. My friend still refuses to play it. But after observing a friend playing it for the PS3 and being one who needs to actually play the game before judging it I had to see for myself. What I found was that somehow Touchstone had managed to not only revive Turok from the depths of a horribly fatal past but actually create Turok into an innovative single player experience.
The premise of Turok is that you're are a turncoat leading a group of soldiers on an attack against Cain, your former teacher and a typical villian. After your ship is shot down you are forced to navigate your way through the planets endless jungle forest complete with the series trademark villians, Dinosaurs. Within the first half hour of gameplay you get a taste of what a T-Rex is capable of.
As you make your way to infiltrate Cains base you are forced to hook up with Slade, a surviving soldier who hates your guts and voiced by the ever brilliant Ron Pearlman (Hellboy). With a decent if not excellent storyline in place, Turok seeks to expand on that by introducing an innovating style of FPS action.
Instead of carrying an infinite supply of weapons you have a set of a knife, 2 choice guns, and Turoks trademark bow and arrow (modernized to a compound bow). Now at first I was skeptical about this set up, but the game does each gun justice.
First off is the knife. and before I get into the mechanics I must say that I have played numerous games before utilizing a close range weapon. UT and Quake's last ditch weapon is ok if you're a master at the game, Call of Duty 4's combat knife is good for an instant kill but the epic-ness ends there. shank, they're dead, the end. And the only game that seemed to do a knife any justice, Resident Evil 4, limited it's real use to cut scenes.
However, Turok, seeks to take the knife and bring back it's practicality by integrating the cutscene style combat from combat into the gameplay. See an enemy soldier standing around on patrol. Running up behind him and clicking the attack button pans the camera back to a 3rd person perspective for one of about 3-4 different death scenes. The same goes for dinosaurs though the cutscenes are limited to only one. Slashing a Raptor or Compy's throat open to name one.
As for the bow, it adds a slight element of stealth, though this is no Metal Gear Solid (what game is), it is nice to hide in some tall grass and pick off scouts one by one down the line.
However when it comes to fire fights the knife and bow are rendered almost useless. Yet this is where Turoks true innovation comes in. While previous games allowed you to dual weild weapons, this does it with anything the size of a machine gun or smaller. want to weild two machine guns, done. A machine gun and a pistol, done. Or my personal favorite, a machine gun and the timed-sticky-grenade gun (yes it's exactly what you think). Where this deviates from previous games of its kind is that while dual weilding it eliminates the zoom functions on guns in exchange for replacing the right click with alternate fire. left click fires the left gun, right click fires the right giving you control over the weapons not seen in many games. Fire the right one until it's empty then switch to the left while you reload the right, or just own all with dual firing.
But don't expect to just run in with both guns blazing. The game does well enough with the AI to add a challenge while making your way through the single player mode. Allow yourself to be surrounded without cover and you're toast within seconds.
As for the single player not much changes except that the challenge increases as it switches to Actual Intelligence. Nice additions to the typical FPS matches like Capture the flag include Dinosaurs thrown in to mess up players while shooting things up.
The only thing I had to complain about the game is the load time. It takes a good ten minutes to load the game and about the same time in between deaths as it has to reload the level. However this did not matter to me much for once in the game it makes it worth the wait.
To wrap up, while Turok has had a sketchy past, the Unreal Engine and change of ownership has done the series good and created a truly innovative and cinematic single player experience with an interesting multiplayer option to mix things up with little to complain about.