The dinosaur hunt is on...
This time around, Turok is an ex-con turned military man with a vendetta, coerced into joining a rag-tag company of marines on a mission to extract and imprison a rogue agent wreaking havoc on a newly terraformed planet. Things do not go to plan, and soon Turok's allies in Whiskey Company find themselves dispersed across the hostile world, persecuted by the forces of the man they came to capture and harried by the planet's own primordial ecosystem.
The game is at its best in its stealth sections, where you pick off witless foes at range while creeping through the long grass, using the flare launcher to entice dinosaurs into attacking your human opponents. Unfortunately, this plays a lesser part in the overall game, outweighed by slightly turgid gunplay. Turok himself moves with frustrating sloth and the aiming controls have an unnaturally abrupt acceleration to them that sends your reticule skittering over your mark.
The mad-cap arsenal of Turok's past is replaced with a more mundane armoury; your bow, with its ability to pin enemies to walls, is the most entertaining and effective ranged weapon at your disposal, and the cinematic knife kills offer a visceral thrill the first few times you see them. Many of the smaller dinosaurs are thus dispatched with a context-sensitive tap of the trigger – in fact the knife is really the only effective means of getting through a pack of velociraptors, resulting in protracted battles which amount to a string of bloody, but often near-identical, animations.
The difficulty is really only in reorienting yourself once the animation has finished, since the cinematics leave you in a different position from when you initiated the kill. The mushy jungle level design does little to help you find your direction again, and things get worse when it's dark. And then things get worse still when it's dark and enemies are firing explosive rounds which repeatedly knock you off your feet and leave you facing a completely different direction with your vision blurred. Such visual effects can be used well to denote damage, but here the tedious cool-down frustrates rather than adrenalizes.
It may be that such disorientation is realistic but, equally, perhaps realism is not the thing to be aiming for in a game whose central pleasure is the ability to kick dinosaurs in the face. It is of particular concern when death entails a punitive ten-minute trek from the last checkpoint. In fact, one of the very last and trickiest missions can see you lose 20 minutes of play, and doesn't even have the decency to put its checkpoint after the level's introductory cut scene. Lengthy loading times are another reason to begrudge the game's difficulty level which, even on the lowest setting, contains spikes that will have you staring at the loading screen for a sizeable chunk of play time.
Yet, somehow, Turok manages to be a more compelling experience than its many and obvious failings would suggest. A lot of this can be attributed to elements peripheral to the actual action of the game – things such as the excellent animation. It is fundamentally this that makes the dinosaurs convincing and fearsome enemies. Attention has been lavished on these creatures – kill one and it writhes for a few moments, clawing at the ground in a febrile attempt to get purchase. Human enemies will similarly use their last breaths to crawl away from you before expiring – animations that appear to be partly procedural, so that the limbs interact with the environment in a way that suggests real contact.
Equal care has been given to facial animations and the depiction of the characters as a whole, made particularly evident in the cut scenes. Turok himself glowers with doleful petulance, and the exaggerated under bite and heavy brow of your grudging companion, Slade, create one of the more expressive faces in videogames. In fact, although the hard-bitten space marines invite obvious comparisons with Gears of War, Turok's allies have significantly more personality than those charm less hulks.
Much of this is a product of the voice-acting, and, in particular, the presence of Ron Perlman in the cast. There's not a huge amount of dialogue to work with, and yet Perlman turns the surly, world-weary Slade into a sympathetic and humorous figure – a character whose initial animosity towards the player could otherwise have been grating. Powers Booth also puts in a performance as the amoral antagonist, Kane, which elevates him above the stereotypical bogeyman. Although clearly restricted by genre and setting, the script is not without merit, and, perhaps surprisingly, you find yourself quite invested in the storyline – largely a result of the intermittent flashbacks which slowly reveal Turok's prior relationship with Kane.
This interest does not really communicate itself to the game's action. For the most part it's hard to care about the fate of the marines on the planet, and the characterization of Kane's Wolf Pack as elite assassins is at odds with the bumbling soldiers you dispatch for the greater part of the game. The sad fact is that this combat mostly fails to ignite interest, and combined with its cruel difficulty spikes, occasional glitches and a severe differential in graphical quality between 360 and PS3 versions (the latter losing out), Turok's strong contextualization and smattering of brave ideas get buried.