Turok - Dinosaur Planet Does Not Automatically Make a Good FPS

Turok’s glory days were on the N64, and after a long slump of badly hashed sequels, Turok for Xbox 360 still never makes up for the ground lost. Turok is Halo 2 with aliens replaced with dinosaurs, AI replaced with sheer stupidity, and some kind of flashback plot about your main character being a traitor.

Graphically – If you sit very far away this game might look good

Turok has butt-ugly textures that remind me strangely of Xbox days and not of the 360. While the polygon count is higher, the game’s long development time looks obvious in the final release. They’ve added some nice effects of course, giving everything that plastic wrap that Doom 3 made popular but one can easily tell that the graphics just manage to live up to Halo 2. The other huge detriment is in the animations. Dinosaurs pounce around with a kind of weird jerky motion as if they’re not sure which animation sequence to go in to, and on occasion I’ve seen enemy soldiers circling in a choppy motion.

With dinosaurs being the main highlight of this game, they could definitely use a face lift that gives them a touch more realism than that of the Arcade shooter Jurassic Park. Facing off against a T-rex doesn’t really provide the right intensity when he’s walking around like a mechanical Aibo.

Gameplay - Dinosaurs Do Have Small Brains!

Turok might have redeemed itself graphically if it was a good FPS package otherwise but it’s not and the biggest suffering is actually in the gameplay. The developers must have decided that gamers wanted a safari shooting gallery game because quite frankly- the gameplay doesn’t make one bloody piece of sense.

The AI is composed of something a bit worse than your average fare clone army. They don’t even try to flank you (though the game warns you they will). If you shoot them from afar they will sometimes run back and forth confused. I’ve seen a few reload, crouch, reload, and act like eccentric buggers. Other times I’ve seen some hide for cover except for the fact their giant shoulder is still sticking out. In this case you can easily knock them out with a well placed shot. Worst yet, the buggy AI is also in the dinosaurs who on occasion behave the same way. Sometimes they’ll zig zag left and right like they have no idea what to do, other times they’ll home in on you like a missile. The one thing the AI does right at least is that it properly scripts AI vs. AI encounters right. If the enemy is standing near some dinosaurs, they’ll get distracted and have a little mini-fight first before they take you on. This can be important to get by some hairy situations.

With AI this stupid, Turok should be a breeze. The problem again is it’s not. To compensate for idiot enemies, the game designers apparently thought it’d be good to give Turok no life meter, mimicking Call of Duty 4. This is a completely fine thing to do as it reduces the need to pick up med kits or have a distracting number on the screen, but the problem is that it makes taking cover severely important. A game set in wide-open spaces shouldn’t really rely on cover, and you’ll find yourself dying for the stupidest reasons as a few of the bad AI whittle your life down to nothing in sheer seconds while you find yourself desperately lacking cover. Even if they are stupid, they apparently are crack shots in the jungle and can kill you regardless of almost where you stand. Same goes for the dinosaurs, in packs you might have to hide in a tree log and slowly pick off one at a time before proceeding. While it’s possible to knife a group of them, it takes a bit of luck that can make things pretty frustrating.

Weapons - My Nerf Shotgun Isn't Hurting Him

The praise of Turok has mainly been in its weapons arsenal, but I find the praise a bit exaggerated. The knife is the king of Turok and almost every enemy in the game can be knifed, resulting in an animation that has you auto-killing your victim. Problem here is it’s the same animation over and over. Even worse, you can get attacked while you are knifing. If you knife a guard and forget to spot another machine gunner a few yards down, you can get shot down while you’re going through the animation and die. It’s pretty annoying.

Knifing is also kind of glitchy. Sometimes you’ll run up to the back of guys thinking you have the whole knife thing down but then the trigger won’t show and you’ll miss, which can result in death as tons of guards are alerted and take you out. Or it can trigger a pack of raptors that will repeatedly knock you down, preventing you from fending them off. Finally, the last problem is despite how cool knifing is, when you’re done with the kill you lose orientation of your character so you won’t know which way the tree log is that you’re standing next to. This also can get you killed. Still, knifing is one of the preferred ways to go through Turok as it’s the most effective method of dispatching dinosaurs which would otherwise take 100s of bullets.

The dual weapon system is a nice one but the weapons are kind of too weak for fending off armored guards and dinosaurs. The shotgun almost never kills anything in one hit; it’ll take often 3-4 centered shots to get a nice kill. There are a bunch of other guns like a futuristic chaingun, a machine gun and so on, but nothing that really stands out. What is nice though is that for each gun there are two fire modes, one for each shoulder button on the controller, and this gives more flexibility to play style in the game.

Finally there’s the bow and arrow that made Turok into what it is. This overpowered weapon is the ultimate people finisher. It’s too bad that it doesn’t work too well in close-combat situations. Like the knife it almost kills everything in the game in one hit so you’ll want to use it a lot, but arrow ammo doesn’t come by too often. Every other ammo type on the other hand, does come by pretty often, so expect to be using your other guns most of the time and switching to arrows and knife only as needed.

Sounds - Apparently Dinosaurs Don't Weigh Much

Turok had yet another chance to redeem itself. If it had lively ambience that captured the flavor of the jungle with great dinosaur sounds that made my skin crawl, I would again have given it more credit. Instead though, there’s only weak shotgun sounds for the nerf weapons you carry around and the dinosaurs don’t make nearly as much noise as they should, making them seem paper light. The voice acting is reasonable, but it’s the one thing that Turok only kind of got right in the sounds department.

Story - What Story?

I don’t condemn FPS games for paltry storylines, and so whether Turok managed to pull one off or not is not really a huge issue to me. However one has to agonize a little bit over the cliché ridden landscape. Turok at least is a minority- he’s supposed to be a Native American sporting a Mohawk- which reminds me strangely of Prey which also starred a Native American. I do wonder how it is in the gaming industry you’ve got Native Americans playing lead roles…it’s certainly a plus that Turok goes this route. But despite minority representation, the storyline is convoluted. Turok is a traitor to some kind of elite Wolfpack, and ends up stranded on some island in the stage of rapid evolution with a rag-tag crew that hates him for his “cowardly ways”. There are a few muddled flashbacks to interrupt your dinosaur safari, and none of it is really that provoking or good.

Conclusion

Turok is an insult to me as a gamer. It’s like packaging every other FPS with dinosaurs, and trying to sell the game purely on the name and concept. The problem is that it goes way below average gameplay and production and plays like a half-made beta. I was miffed to find that fighting a T-rex only involved hiding in the roots of a strangely growing tree, and blasting at it with all the ammo I had while it ran around me confused occasionally ducking its head in to snap at me. With gameplay that only Captain Obvious can appreciate, I’d hate to say it, but Turok gets low marks in my book. Avoid it.