Fun Fact: A fountain of blood spurts out as you stab a dinosaur in the eye!!
You play as a rough and tough guy named Turok. He has just been recruited into a squad with other people that look as tough as him, though nobody likes him very much at a glance. They don't like him because Turok used to be on another squad and he betrayed them, so nobody trusts him yet. But before anything else happens the space ship that you are in reaches its destination. However, before even entering the planet's atmosphere, you are hit by a missile or something. You then wake up still in the wreckage of the ship, you have one man by your side. The first mission teaches you all the controls of the game while you find a way out of this wreckage, the other man leads the way; though he soon dies and you are left alone...for a bit.
As soon as you are playing as Turok in the first person perspective, you should notice the average effort put into this game while making the graphics. The wreckage is displayed really nicely with all the crumpled metal parts and the sparks of electricity emerging every few seconds. It can also get scary because the graphics allow you to see a small movement of a large piece of metal before it falls a few millimeters away from you. Then as the game wears on, the graphics are mostly presented with the dinosaurs. There are many species of dinosaurs in the game and all of them look very real, you can even notice a small amount of reflection of the sun on the dinosaur's body; or even on the knife that you are just about to use to murder the dinosaur. My favorite part of the game is stabbing the dinosaur; whether the dinosaur is the size of your leg or ten times bigger than you. Stabbing the dinosaur is done differently for each kind of dinosaur, and they are all done ruthlessly and very swiftly. Though they are all done in a different manner, all of them have the same result - a fountain of blood before instant death. Even though the fountain of blood looks a bit unrealistic, the satisfaction you get from doing that is amazing. Also, many times there are quite a few dinosaurs together so stabbing them one after the other can be really fun, though it can also get a little repetitive because the dinosaurs that attack in packs are all the same dinosaurs and so the way Turok stabs them is always the same. Another disappointment with this is that in some parts of the game, the dinosaurs come in too large packs and it is very easy for them to kill you before you get a chance to kill them.
There are not only dinosaurs in the game, there are more bad guys in the game than dinosaurs - sometimes I wish that it was the other way around and sometimes I don't. The bad guys are all wearing a strong black outfit which makes them harder to kill. This can get really annoying when you are facing a lot of bad guys together, and that is one of the many reasons the game did not get a higher score. Though the graphics presented through the bad guys are pretty cool, one reason is because you can see their red eyes staring at you, telling you to move before the bullets hit you. Here's another reason why the game didn't get the points it could have gotten: the bad guys always want you dead, even when you are with a group. By this I mean, if there is a bad guy with an RPG, he will always aim at you, and it gets kind of annoying because by the time you get up from the hit, another RPG bullet has already reached you, he doesn't care about the other people on your side. The graphics of the guns are also pretty cool, there are many different kinds of guns in the game; starting from an ordinary pistol to a RPG, and all of them work very nicely and have their own amount of impact on the unlucky opponent. My favorite gun would have to be the energy type of gun that shoots you blue rays, though it can get a little annoying because it overheats too fast. Though the aspect that made the guns as cool as they should be are the sound effects.
Throughout the game, the background music is always exciting and heart pumping. The sounds of the gun shots are very realistic. But the thing I loved best about the sound effects were the roars of the dinosaurs. I have no idea where the makers got the sounds from, but all I know is that they got it right. The sound of the T-Rex's roar is the most frightening of all because when it roars, you can hear it clearly over the sounds of the gunfire everywhere. Another sound effect that I loved is when you stab the dinosaurs, you can hear the blade ripping through the flesh of the dinosaur and then the sound of the dinosaur screaming in pain. Both these sound together sent a shiver up my spine, it was that realistic.
One of the real letdowns in the game is the amount of checkpoints in a level. There aren't many. This can get really annoying because you might have just finished a very tough battle against the bad guys and then suddenly a dinosaur pops out and kills you. Even if you survive the attack from the dinosaur, another battle with the bad guys in bound to kill you, and then you will have to do the first battle all over again...happens a lot during the campaign. And it is at these frustrating points in the game that you feel like quitting and destroying the game.
Though there aren't many cut scenes during the game, they can get annoying. This is because you watch the cut scene (and some can get pretty long and dull), and then you fight. If you die during the fight over and over again, you will have to watch the cut scene over and over again because the checkpoint was just before the cut scene. And trust me, some cut scenes can get pretty dull, and you cannot skip them.
Finally, I just want to express how much I enjoyed the game at the start, because the first few levels were set to the right difficulty. But then, as I went further into the game, some levels are really impossible and frustrating because they were extremely difficult. Otherwise, a fun game to play to stab your way through.
Graphics = 7.5/10
Storyline = 7/10
Sound effects = 9/10
Difficulty of getting achievements = 4/5 (Very Hard)