Where's the Cerebral Bore?!
Two months ago, raptors were revived in Turok on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Rather than ravage the videogame landscape and devour any and all comers, the beasts and their title were met with stiff reviews but commendable sales.
Now, the dinos are ready to try their claws at the PC market.
A re-imagining of the Nintendo 64 classic, Turok -- the latest project from Touchstone and Propaganda Games -- places you behind the bow and arrow of Joseph Turok and teams you with the ragtag members of Whiskey Company. Seems Turok used to be a member of a ruthless group of mercenaries known as Wolfpack but bailed when the whole baby-killing thing didn't mesh with his conscience. Now an adopted member of Whiskey Co., Turok and the boys are on the trail of his old mentor -- Roland Kane. The leader of Wolfpack has holed himself up on a remote planet, and as our boys approach, they're shot down. Whiskey Company begins to explore the planet, and the mission quickly switches from capturing Kane to making it past the dinosaurs, armed guards as well as mutated scorpions and getting home.
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For the most part, Turok plays like every other first-person shooter out there. You switch weapons with the d-pad/mouse wheel, jump, crouch and blast your way through jungle environments, Wolfpack outposts and more. But what makes Turok stand out from the glut of recent FPSs is how you can kill -- such as sneaking up behind a guard, dropping him with a kick to the knee and burying your knife in the top of his head.
Now, don't get me wrong; COD4 and BioShock were great times, but as a gamer I always found myself trying to balance my ballistics with reality. In COD, I was trying to save my grenades for those seemingly impossible hallways filled with terrorists, and in BioShock, I was hesitant to waste my Adam in fear that I'd need a powered-up plasmid for a Big Daddy or boss. For most of those games, I felt like I needed to play defensively.
That doesn't happen here. Turok takes your reins off.
No, the ammo isn't unlimited, but you are fully encouraged to use whatever weapon you want however you want. There'd be times when I'd enter a new section of jungle and find a makeshift guard base with stacks of weapons all over the place. I'd arm the chaingun, run out and blast some dinosaurs, get tired of the gun and backtrack to find something more to my liking. Once I settled on an instrument of destruction -- such as my favorite, the sticky bomb gun -- I could truck back out confident that there was more ammo behind me and plenty of spots to switch to something different ahead.
Towards the end of the game, I was making a solo attack on one of Kane's bases, and the weapon gods were good to me once again. Able to infiltrate the front door undetected, I drew back on my bow and iced two guards before they knew Turok was on the scene. If you haven't caught our videos of this game, the bow is a sick silent killer. You draw back the arrow and then line up your shot with the crosshairs. The longer you hold the trigger down, the harder Turok's pulling on the string. If you let it go with enough force, the arrow will basically staple the bad guy to the nearest wall. Nice.
Anyway, with the two chumps down, I moved deeper into the fortress and came across a staircase to the next level and a soldier staking out the top. I switched to the sticky bomb gun, tagged the bad man's leg and blew him to kingdom come. This tipped off the whole establishment that Whiskey Co. was there, and I began mining the hell out of the staircase and surrounding area. Clueless troops would come down the stairs and go boom. When the sticky bomb gun was on empty, I grabbed a nearby chaingun and -- utilizing its secondary fire -- set it up on the ground as a turret. It obliterated anyone able to come down the stairs.
Adding more options to your four weapons slots -- you'll always have the bow and knife but be able to swap out your other two gun slots -- is the fact that you can dual-wield just about every combination of guns. SMG/shotgun, dual pistols, sticky bomb/shotgun -- the world's your oyster.
Believe me, there's nothing quite like packing two shoguns and working your way through a hoard of enemies. Add in the fact that you have stealth knife attacks -- forget about guards, you can sneak up on dinosaurs with your knife drawn, follow a button prompt and watch as Turok buries his blade into the beast's head or jumps on its back before slitting its throat -- and parts of this game are sure to get your blood pumping.
In a lot of ways, this is first-person Contra -- lots of weapons, jungle, etc. -- but that isn't always a good thing.
To begin with, the weapons I've spent so many words lauding are cool on the options side but disappointing on the firepower front. If I didn't get a headshot on an enemy, it took a seemingly endless stream of bullets to bring them down no matter what gun I seemed to be packing. When you're in one-on-one combat, that's not too big of a problem, but when enemies are swarming on you -- one instance where Slade and Turok were trying to make it over a tree bridge springs to mind -- the remedial damage your weapons give off is pretty annoying.
What makes the annoyance worse is the fact that getting killed by these soldiers is pretty embarrassing seeing as how they're idiots. If we ever know the IGN offices have an intruder in them and I come across Game Scoop's Daemon Hatfield pinned to the wall by an arrow, I'm not going to stand in the exact same spot he was two seconds ago and scan the area -- nor if I see a guy with a machine gun am I going to organize the team to run in a straight line at him.
Kane's men don't share this common sense.
Turok isn't exempt from my wrath either. I know I talked about the weapon options being cool, but the lack of a run button (� la Call of Duty 4) is pretty upsetting. Our main character is trained to survive in the jungle, kill people with his bare hands and leap from sniper towers, but he can't hoof-it from enemies? There are plenty of times when the dinos swarm, your screen begins to turn red and escaping to take a breath is your only option.
There's nothing more frustrating than only being able to speed walk away from certain death.
Beyond AI and controls, what's going to be a sticking point for lots of folks is that the visuals just aren't up to snuff. The graphics in Turok are by no means bad, but you're going to walk up to ledges and trees that have really sharp edges and boring texture patterns -- seeing the seams takes you out of the experience. Beyond things at a standstill looking ho-hum, there are troubles in motion as well. Characters in cutscenes occasionally have an aura of shine around them -- they all look like the light of the Lord is being emitted from their bodies
Now, I don't raise these as complaints because I hate being challenged -- I raise these issues because I like being challenged intelligently. Let me ruin the spider tank part for you. This huge tank with arachnid-like limbs lumbers onto the scene, and I stopped moving to see where it would go. Eventually the thing perches itself on a mountain and begins scanning the area. There are a few hollowed out logs and half-walls separating me from RPG ammo, and I figure I need to keep to the shadows. I no sooner step out, this thing's got a read on me, and I'm dead. The game loads, I let it sit, I jump in the log and it starts firing. I wait for a reloading pause or some kind of break, but it never comes. Finally, I make a break for it and end up getting blown up.
This trial and error stuff went on for awhile before I figured out that if I just booked as soon as the tank showed up, I could make it to the ammo, slide back and forth from behind cover, and bring the cool tank down in the most anticlimactic way.
Speaking of linear, remember that Contra comparison I made a second ago? Sure, that applies to the fun of blasting the bad guys but it also references how straightforward Turok's levels are. As you cross the plains, you'll find plenty of opposition but not one environment that interacts with you. You're just running across set pieces.
Although multiplayer wasn't amazing on the consoles, it's actually even less impressive on the PC. There are seven maps, the weapons from the single-player campaign, dinosaurs, the multiplayer staples such as deathmatch and capture the flag, but there's no way to customize your game unless you host a LAN party. If you choose the quick match option, you'll just get thrown into whatever game is ready to go. If you choose the custom match option, you only get to choose what type of match -- small free for all, large free for all, small team game, large team game, or one of three co-op missions -- you want to go to. You can't choose weapons or maps, which you can do on the console versions of Turok.
Oh, and on a love it or hate it note, when you get attacked by a dino or knocked down by a grenade, you'll see your feet get knocked up in the air. When you climb back to your feet, you'll find yourself facing a different direction than before. On one hand, it's a neat drawback to getting hurt, but on the other, it sucks if you're on your last legs and it's suddenly that much harder to speed walk to safety.
Closing Comments
There's no doubt that Turok can be fun, but ultimately, the feeling of satisfaction that comes with slitting a raptor's throat or pulling off a headshot with your bow is lost in the shuffle of swarming enemies, less than stellar visuals and a story that disappears. Do I recommend Turok for folks just looking for a game to run through with two shotguns in hand? Yes, but I wouldn't expect to walk away from playing with your mind blown.
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