Another bland FPS is brought to the masses.
For those who have never played the original Turok was actually based off of a comic book of the same name. That's a little bit before my time so I don't know much about the comic, but I do know about the game which put you in the shoes of Tal' Set a "Time Traveling Warrior" and had you running around this "Lost Land" preventing it form being destroyed by some evil cyborg organization…..or something like that. Sorry it has been 11 years since I played the game, I think there was even a giant dragon fly or something there too. Regardless it was a pretty decent game, save for the fact that it never kept my then 8 year old mind entertained with finding keys to unlock doors.
That said, lets fast forward 11 years our time and probably a million or three in Turoks time. To a futureristic world, where you've crash landed with a military group called WHISKEY Team on an Alien planet full of dinosaurs and mercenaries led by Kane, Turoks former boss in this group called Wolf Pack. That's the setting for the latest Turok, pretty simple right? Well let's get to the review.
GAMEPLAY:
As with any first person shooter the objective is to, duh shoot stuff. So all the usual stuff is there the circle strafing, the ducking, the reloading the whole nine yards. But what Turok does a little differently is plays on the stealth side of the game. Amongst the amalgam of generic weaponry you find in a FPS (Smg, Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, Etc) you also get a bow as well as your knife. They both work as well as you'd expect but there are some severe flaws with the system.
With the bow ive ran into many instances where iam pulling the bow back and suddenly every bad guy on the planet knows my position. No I realize that pulling a bow back can cause some noise but not enough to make a group of people aware of you when they're in the middle of a jungle with dinosaurs around. The knife has been pretty solid except for the fact that you actually have to select it as a weapon to use. I find this a bit ridiculous but I may just be spoiled by COD4 and Halo with their melee buttons, but I think it's a bit of a stretch. What it does most is breaks up the action, now Instead of getting in a heated fire fight and seeing a guy run around a corner and getting killed because I couldn't switch to my knife is pretty damned annoying.
Speaking of the enemies they range from annoying dinosaurs to stupid mercenaries. The dinosaurs are dumb animals, and they act like it they're attacks is random, quick, annoying and powerful. But on the down side anything under the size of a Dilophasaurus can be quickly dispatched with proper timing from your knife. Which would be great but seeing the same two or three deaths kind of ruin the stealth kill deal. But good old fashioned bullets work just as well.
Your human enemies though, are on par with some of the stupidest enemies in any game to date. Their thought of taking cover means either leaning in and out from a box, or standing in the middle of nowhere waiting for you to shoot them. The only thing they have going for them is that the will abuse the flanking maneuver if you give the ma chance, and even when they do it its only one or two guys at a time. They aren't the brightest targets, but they do put up a bit of a fight in groups….once they realize they shouldn't stand together around the grenade.
Your weaponry is pretty bland, I mean you have your basics of any FPS. An assault rifle, cept this on's in plasma form, rocket launcher, smg, rail gun, and the grenade launcher. The only weapons worth mentioning are the shotgun and the flamethrower. First off the flamethrower's flame looks beautiful, plus there's no greater joy than roasting your enemies and have it look cool at the same time. The shotgun has a great secondary feature where it shoots flares, which are all but useless save for the fact that they can be used to lure a raptor or attacking dino in another direction. Which in theory means that you could shoot a flare at the enemy and the raptor would attack, but in actuality most of the time the dino will just stand there and stare at the flare without doing anything. Then wait till the flare goes out and continue their attack on you.
Graphics:
Just like every other game in the universe it runs on the Unreal Engine. So it's going to look really good. The dinosaurs look about as realistic as you'd expect, and all of your allies and enemies as well as the surrounding backdrop look good. The only problem I have with it is that sometimes you get a white outline around some of the characters in the cutscene. Besides that it's as good as you can expect anything running that engine to be.
Sound:
The sound is relatively decent, your in a jungle so you get all the ambient forest sounds as well as the sounds of anything approaching your. But for some odd reason the sounds of the weapons always seem a bit off, and they cause the weapon to feel weaker than it actually is. Instead of getting a satisfying boom from your gun all you get is a sort of downgraded pop. This is disappointing but nothing that would bug anyone but me that much.
Value:
It's a 60 dollar title that could be completed in 10-14 hours depending on how you play. But once the single players done, theres no real reason to go back on the harder difficulty. And with the lack of a decent multiplayer, there's no real reason to grab this game unless you're a huge Turok fan. Give it a rent, Blockbuster got it early and should have a decent amount in stock.
Tilt:
It's a bland FPS that honestly could have had a main character named anything and still been about wolf pack and killing dinosaurs. The game was made specifically to be a new Turok but at the end of the day it just seems like the name was glued on the box.