Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Turok started off on the Nintendo 64 with a unique concept of the player fighting against man and dinosaur.  Since it was one of the first FPS games on the N64, the game gained quite a following and spawned a sequel.  Since then, the name Turok has garnered much sneering after Turok: Evolution.  Seeming to have a permanent place in bargain bins everywhere, the ridiculous characters made Turok the pun of many bad gaming jokes along the vein of Daikatana and Superman 64.

Now Turok has landed on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, going through a reboot in the process.  You play as Joseph Turok, a Native American who has turned from his heritage.  Turok is a former black ops commando who is now a part of Whiskey Company, an elite Special Forces unit.  You mission is to take down Roland Kane, a war criminal and Turok’s former leader, and his Mendel-Gruman army.

What is it with shooters and the need to be in dark places lately?  After playing TimeShift, I felt that the developers had similar texture and lighting artists.  While the jungle areas are bright with sunlight and vegetation, you’ll often find yourself in buildings where the electricity bills haven’t been paid.  While these dark areas could be great for those times when you want to sneak around, it doesn’t exactly work out that way.  It’s also difficult to see your way through and it’s easy to get stuck against and object, even if you turn up the gamma filter several notches.

The vegetation in Turok is green and alive.  At the beginning of the game you’ll watch your partner walk through the vegetation and watch it sway as he walks through it.  Unfortunately if you do some circle-strafing at the same time around a particular fauna, you’ll notice that it is always facing towards you.  While it’s not as bad as the old PC shooter The Terminator: Future Shock, it is disorientating when you first see it happening.

Turok does use the Unreal Engine 3, and while it does look good it’s no Gears of War.  The textures on the environments are fine, but sometimes it’s too easy to see how jagged they are because the textures lack smoothness.  Occasionally the framerate will also take a hit, probably because the Xbox 360 version was the lead version.  It gives some credence to Silicon Knights and the issues they’ve had with Too Human.

Turok actually has some background music in-game.  While it doesn’t happen all the time, when it does happen it adds a lot to the immersion factor.  The music feels like a mix of tribal beats with a bit of Native American flavor.  While it sounds like a bit of an odd combination, it works well concerning the storyline and the character you play.

The voices you hear while facing against the Mendel-Gruman army get tired very quickly.  They are more repetitive than Madden in the glory days of the series.  You’ll hear, “Take cover!!” and “Over here!” so many times that you wonder if they have the vocabulary of about twenty words.  I wish I wasn’t exaggerating when I say that.

The positional audio of Turok is handled very well.  If you hear a guard talking from the right side, it will actually happen to your right.  An explosion from the left is distinctively on your left.  As you move, you can hear the sounds move with you.  While it can be subtle, it is more pronounced in Turok and is a major help to where your enemies are.

Anyone who has played a recent shooter will feel like this is old hat to them.  The analog sticks control movement.  The D-pad switches out your weapons.  Hitting X jumps, Square reloads, Circle interacts with the environment, and Triangle crouches or stands depending on your current stance.

The triggers do different things depend on if you are using a single weapon or dual-wielding.  If you are using a single weapon R2 fires, R1 shoots a secondary fire, L1 throws a grenade, and L2 zooms in for a more accurate shot.  When dual-wielding, the R1 and R2 buttons do the same thing, but the L1 and L2 buttons are used for shooting the weapon in your left hand.

There are a few issues with the controls.  First of all, you can’t run during the game.  This gives the game a slow pace.  When you have enemies firing at you and you want to make a hasty retreat, you are reduced to walking as fast as you can.  You also can’t move the cursor as quickly as you should for a console game.  Even if you adjust the sensitivity, I never felt like the aiming moved fast enough.  There are also times when it seems like you can get stuck against objects.  These are inexcusable in shooters these days.

When you start off Turok, you are in a spaceship going after Kane.  It’s implicated that you have a past with Kane, but it’s not explained why.  Not only that, but the other members on the ship don’t trust you.  As you are flying towards the planet Kane is on, the ship is hit.  The ship crash lands and you make your way out.  Once you get out of the ship you find yourself in a jungle.  The sequence is reminiscent of the original Unreal.

Once you get past this sequence, the game really begins.  You’ll notice the dinosaurs off in the distance.  You’ll move with the other survivors of the crash and then find out the dinosaurs aren’t that friendly.  Some of them will attack you.  You can shoot them, but if they get too close they’ll hop on top of you and you’ll have to hit a button repeatedly to get them off of you.  While this felt interactive in Resident Evil 4, it feels like every shooter is trying to copy this and the trend is getting old.  Pretty soon we’ll be seeing this type of button mashing in every shooter just like crates.

The interface in Turok is very minimal.  You have a crosshairs and an indicator of the amount of ammo you have left for your weapons.  The weapons don’t tell you how many rounds they have in them, but instead have a flashing light on them.  When it’s yellow you are running out of ammo, and when it flashes red you are almost out.  You’ll want to pay attention to those indicators so that you can reload when appropriate.

As you get hit, the border of the screen starts to turn red and your vision blurs.  The more you get hit, the redder and blurrier the screen gets.  There aren’t any health packs, so you need to duck and cover to get healed.  While considered unique at one time, it is again becoming standard in shooters to have this kind of health system.

One of the best things about Turok is the weapons.  Once you get your bow and knife, you’ll always have them.  The knife is good for silent kills, but you have to be in close range.  The bow and arrow is great for silent kills over long distances.  You can hold up to two separate guns.  What is great about this is the fact that you can dual-wield the guns in any combination that you want.  You can put the SMG in your right hand and the sticky bomb gun in the other.  Shotgun in one hand and handgun in the other is available.  You could even dual wield these guns and plant the ammo in the enemies.

The dinosaurs can be your greatest enemy, but they can be your friend as well.  They don’t discriminate who they attack.  Sometimes you can throw a flare into a group of soldiers and sit back and watch the carnage coming from a T-Rex.

Once you get past these positives, the negatives really show their ugly heads.  First of all, the game is the definition of linear.  The original Super Mario Brothers had more areas to explore than Turok.  You go from point A to point B throughout the level, but there aren’t many areas to explore for hidden ammo.  Occasionally there are multiple pathways to get from point A to point B, but these are few and far between.  Most of the time you have a line to follow and it’s practically laid out for you.

Secondly, the game isn’t that difficult to finish.  Most areas are easy to get through without too much of a problem.  However, there are some areas that are controller-throwing frustrating.  When you aren’t moving, it seems like the enemy doesn’t have any idea where you are.  Once you take one step though, they have a laser-like sight on you.  It’s almost as if they have ESP.  This isn’t saying that they are smart, even though they do take cover if you are firing at them.  They are of the “run in a straight line” type of AI.  They take a lot of ammo to kill though, so when you do get killed it is usually because of sheer numbers and not any kind of strategy.  It also doesn't help that the save checkpoints are spaced irradically.  Sometimes you encounter several waves of enemies before you finally get to a save point, while other times you'll go from one save point to the next without encountering any enemies at all.  This makes the game frustrating when you need to replay sequences over and over again.

Finally, things start out fairly interesting as far as the story goes.  You learn a bit about Turok’s past and how Kane influenced him.  As you play the game, you find out that Kane is terraforming the planet, but you are never given an explanation why or how the dinosaurs come into play.  By the end of the game, you are just happy to finish.

The game isn’t that long, other than the frustrating parts where you need play the level over and over again.  However, if you aren’t satisfied with completing the game, the PS3 version includes “Accomplishments.”  Yes, the Achievement system from the Xbox 360 has invaded the PS3 version.  There are 43 in all, and while some are easy to perform, some will take a while to complete.

If you feel like playing against some buddies, then you can always check the multiplayer.  Six modes are available.  Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Assault Capture the Flag, and Co-Op are all self-explanatory.  War Games features objective-based matches that depend on the map that they are played on.  One game objective is finding a bomb on the map and blowing up your enemies’ base.  Another objective is taking and holding towers on the map.  While there isn’t anything really new here, it’s nice that they are provided.  The weapons make this a bit more interesting than most other shooters, but there isn't anything else to set the multiplayer modes apart.

Turok is another in a series of reboots, whether we’re talking about games, movies, or TV shows.  The thing that sucks is that you really don’t have much of an idea what is going with Turok or the enemy you are fighting against.  With the dinosaurs in the game, it could have been a very interesting game that really set itself apart from other shooters.  Instead, we get a boring and mostly easy game with a few places that cause controller-throwing frustration.  Hopefully Propaganda can warrant a sequel that advances the plot and creates a better overall game.  Otherwise Turok stands to become another game that really has a lot of potential but ultimately comes out to be disappointing.

Gaming Trend Score

67

1. Graphics: 80
2. Audio: 78
3. Controls: 70
4. Gameplay: 55
5. Value/Replay: 66
6. OVERALL:67