Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

The Good
Turok is a living oddity, a good console fps? A good console fps by Acclaim?? Has the world gone mad? Have I smoked too much of that wacky tobacky? Nope, brace yourself man, because believe it or not, for as dreadful as it may sound... Turok is a blast!

Based on the now dead Acclaim comic of the same name Turok: Dinosaur Hunter casts you as Joshua, the latest in the line of "Turoks", ancient native-american guardians of the balance between our earth dimension and a wacky Lost World-like dimension where dinosaurs roam the earth and a wide variety of hostile humanoid creatures reside.

As usual some bad ass mofo nicknamed "The Campaigner" has decided it's time for earth to go boom by using a Chronoscepter thingie to rip the universes apart, so it's up to you to traverse the dino-world collecting the keys that will unlock the portal to the Campaigner's citadel and kick his ass for good.

Got that? Complex I know, but serviceable enough. The game progresses as a standard hub-based fps where you start from this portal node that takes you to different locations in the game world thanks to Turoks plane-shifting powers. This structure helps mask to a degree the linearity of what's basically a traditional shooter, and gives you the opportunity to re-visit each level in case you missed a health boost power-up or a key weapon.

The levels themselves are very impressive in their architecture, sure most consist simply of open areas, but even the simplest level in the game is filled with winding hills, strange structures, twisty underwater caves and all other sorts of imaginative landmarks. Believe it or not, it makes exploring the game a truly unique experience, as you explore every nook and cranny in search for a new weapon, or whatever may be in store for you with a true sense of interest and not just to see what the hell lies ahead or what monster awaits for you in that strange temple-like structure. Turok's world is one of the most visually interesting places ever conceived for a traditional fps and makes each location a gameplay bonanza of epic proportions as you dart through jungles and cliffs, or strike dark temples and imposing bunkers.

And speaking of monsters, Turok was one of the earlier fps games that included really amazingly animated beasts, featuring motion-captured moves on every humanoid creature that makes them run, attack and die in very realistic ways (watch what happens when you shoot someone in the neck!), and a collection of very imaginative enemies that can pose some serious challenges (the missile-launching triceratops that squashes it's rider when it dies and the T-Rex boss near the endgame take all the awards alone). And all rendered with a smooth, fully polygonal engine that sports such flashy effects as camera tilting, image distortion and particle effects, and even a pre-Max Payne bullet-time wanna-be effect which is caused by a power-up that makes you hyper fast and puts the whole world in slow mo!

Of course, no fps would be complete with a hefty dose of action, and Turok delivers by truckloads. You'll face hundreds of varied enemies in a wide variety of settings, and contend with challenging jumping puzzles as well as truly challenging boss fights (once again the T-Rex takes the award). And just how do you take care of those wackos? Rough language? Hell no, guns baby!! 14 of them to be exact!!! Turok was the first game that I could remember that had a truly massive arsenal, everything from an explosive bow (take that Rambo!) to a chaingun is here, complete with bitching sound and visual effects and some cool death animations and damage effects. Oh, and as demanded by international fps laws, you also have the requisite "ultimate weapon" that puts all other toys to shame... and what a weapon it is!! The Chronoscepter has to be assembled by collecting all eight of it's pieces around the game world and has only 3 shots, but once you fire it up you see why the baby kept you waiting! Launching all sorts of particle and lightning effects, the Chronoscepter causes shockwaves to ripple all over the screen as pillars of light emerge from the target area, the whole level shakes and comes alive with lightning bolts and everything that was even remotely in it's firing direction just dies, in a word? Kickass!!!

The Bad
The worst flaws in Turok come courtesy of it's console roots. First of all, as a way of maximizing the small save game space of the N64, the save game keeps track of your stats, items and unlocked areas, and allows you to save only in the hub area. So in essence we have 3D Megaman, as every baddie just comes back from the dead in the exact same spot as the game respawns every area over and over again. The game uses a live-based system that allows you to continue a level from one of their various checkpoints if you die somehow, but if you lose all your lives you have to start from the beggining and redo the whole thing until you get it right and save your progress...I don't know about you, but with counted exceptions I hate these sort of cheap-o systems, more reminiscent of an 8-bit famicom game than of a next-generation 3D game...

Then there are the jumping puzzles, they are quite a bunch, and they can pose some serious challenges, and they may rub you the wrong way if you don't get used to them early on. After all I don't need to point out the difficulties these puzzles pose when viewed from a first-person perspective.

And last but not least.... the fog....

THE FOG!!!

Let's see, you have an underpowered 64-bit console only good for Mario games and a game with lots of open areas, so what do you do??? You extend the draw distance about 12 feet from you and just obscure the rest of the world with a fogging effect... greeeeeeeaat.... And nevermind the fact that this is a conversion based on a much more powerful platform that can be upgraded, so why would they bother to rework their engine so that you could control the draw distance instead of hardwiring it to the lackluster N64 specs if it's much easier to just carbon copy the damn thing as it is?... bastards....

Oh yeah, there's also the fact that the game doesn't exploit the Turok character much. In the comics he's a witty Spider-Man like renegade hero that would rather weasel his way out of any responsability than be a superhero. In the game he's just a generic asskicker out to save the world... Oh well...

The Bottom Line
As you can see the game really shocked me when I got my hands on it a while after it hitted the PC platform. If there's anything I expected from a first generation N64 fps game believe me that it wasn't for it to be fun, challenging and imaginative. Sure, it also comes with plenty of console-related problems, but one can clearly see after giving it a go why Acclaim is still churning out sequels to this fantastic shooter. A definitive blast for action fans.

The Good
I first played this game around the same time it was released as one of the first FPS titles for N64, and it was wild.

There is a fine selection of weapons, and for most weapons, there's a second, better weapon which uses the same ammo but in greater quantity (pistol and assault rifle, shotgun and auto shotgun, pulse rifle and the very thoughtfully named 'alien weapon'), so you don't need to needlessly stockpile your pistol ammo all game - it remains useful even in the last few maps.

The gore was probably the most infamous aspect of this game. I was about nine or ten when I first started playing it, and I swear, every time I'd get the animation of the man grabbing at his jugular, spraying blood all over the clean 90 degree angled walls, I'd look over my shoulder to make sure Mom wasn't around. It was that brutal. GoldenEye had a little blood - mostly just the 'stain' which appears on the body after it's been shot - but there definitely weren't any gore fountains.

I'd have to say that the first four 'Maps' of the game are the most fun. I say this because you're still collecting the first nine or ten weapons, which are the only ones that really matter (for reasons I'll cover later), and so it feels like it's worth exploring every inch of the maps, if just to get the Minigun.

The Bad
I'll do this part backwards: First, the maps are horrible. From the get-go, you will find forks everywhere. Some maps begin with a fork (one path being behind the portal you started from). As a result, you start getting into this 'I'm in a maze' mentality where, no matter what, you work your way right-to-left. And as a result, you usually end up finishing a map without having collected all of the keys needed to access the next map, which means you have to do the map all over again, albeit without most of the enemies or power-ups, which essentially turns the game into a dull exploration platformer. Good luck remembering which path(s) you took the first time around!

Which reminds me: Platforming sucks. This game killed platforming for me. I don't remember how frustrating it was on the N64, but I recently replayed it on PC and the jumping is awful. One of the reasons for this is the fact that the game designers took advantage of what could only be described as a control flaw: Turok can strafe and move forward at the same time for a combined velocity. So if I'm replaying a map, I'm doing so running like a dork at a 45 degree angle to the direction I'm facing. It's completely unnecessary; why not just make running faster?

For some reason the game designers clearly noticed this and increased the distance between some of the jumps such that you HAVE to exploit it to make the distance. I suppose it IS more challenging than simply running to the edge of a cliff and leaping right before you get to the edge, but arbitrarily so - it just means that I can't look where I leap (because I'm looking away at a 45 degree angle like a dork). This made sense to somebody at Acclaim, which is hard to believe, and yet it does explain why they failed to do anything of consequence after Turok 2.

Like I said before, the first four maps are fun because you have an incentive to explore: Find the weapons. The first eight weapons or so are definitely worth using, even though you'll find yourself primarily using the first five or six throughout the game and only using the 'big guns' for bosses or when you get kicked into panic-mode. But the real 'big guns' - these being the Nuke, the Particle Accelerator, and the Chronocepter - are simply impractical for anything BUT a boss. And by the time you can possibly reach them, you come to the realization that you haven't even been using the last three weapons you spent a half hour trying to find - why add another to the list?

Indeed. The Nuke carries two rounds max and does pretty much what it promises, hitting everything (including yourself) in a very wide radius. The Particle Accelerator is sort of a red herring in this game, since it actually 'freezes' the enemy before they explode in a big plasma gorefest. The Pulse Rifle or the Alien Weapon could use the same quantity of ammo to kill several enemies, albeit without the cool kill animation. The Chronocepter has to be collected in multiple pieces, so you can't actually use it until the final boss, assuming you've actually found the previous pieces, and it only carries three shots. Given, it's worth finding, since those three shots alone can drive down the Campaigner to half-strength, but...

...by then you'll be sick of this game.

Once you lose the incentive to find the cool guns, once you get sick of peering off the edge of every cliff to make sure there's no secret platform down below which (you hope) leads to one of the keys you need to get to the next level, once you've played through a level three times and not yet found the Level 8 key, once you just want it to be over with so you can get on with the rest of your life, you won't even care that the Chronocepter makes a big flashy boom.

Did I mention the fog? Well, modern games have done away with this technique because modern platforms/PCs can afford the RAM with which to draw the entire visible range of a map. Turok couldn't. The fog obscures the fact that, just beyond our visible range, the map is merely a series of vectors and event points. The biggest problem with this is that the AI can sometimes see and shoot at you before you can do either to them. There's one particularly frustrating platforming section in which you're on a pillar of rock whose top surface is about the size of my desk chair, and you're being fired upon by enemies beyond the fog. Fortunately, you can shoot them, though you have no way of seeing them, so you more or less have to guess where they're shooting from.

The Bottom Line
A lot of people will disrespect this game in fair comparison to GoldenEye, which was, for the most part, a superior FPS released simultaneously with Turok. And in a lot of ways, it was better; no fog, no pointlessly endless exploration, no looking for secrets everywhere, no impractically large weapons, and yet more weapons. But ironically, Turok was better in a lot of aesthetic ways. Despite its graphical deficiency with the fog, the graphics it could display were superior; gore and fluid effects were almost nonexistent in GoldenEye (no swimming, for example, which is a fairly crucial skill in Turok, and minimal gore); explosions were also far more varied in color, size, and texture, whereas GoldenEye only had two or three 'sizes' of the same generic explosion.

But what Turok lacks in comparison to its more popular FPS peer is functionality. You don't need to swim or jump in GoldenEye because you'll be too busy doing the S part of FPS (which is not Swimming). All of the stunts which Turok pulled to sell well were brilliant at the time, and in hindsight feel boring. But, then again, Turok was a first-generation title for the N64, and that's what such game designers have to do in order to ensure the console's success. I remember the shock and awe I felt playing Halo on the Xbox for the first time, and now it feels somewhat mediocre.

So take it with a grain of salt and think about 1997. Go ahead and compare it to every FPS available at the time (that wasn't GoldenEye). At the time, it was a very ambitious, albeit confused title, which couldn't seem to decide if it was a platformer or a first-person shooter. But if you judged it by the standards which all first-generation titles of new gaming platforms are subject to - the five-minute gameplay demo - you'd find it exhilarating too. And so the best thing I can say about this game is that it did, and frankly, still does its job well. Does it compare to FPS titles available today? No. Does it feel like a chore by the end? Yes. But if you've got twenty minutes, give this game a shot.

The Good
Lots of weapons, 6 huge worlds, and the funny sound guys make when you blow them up! This game has little to do about "Dinosaur Hunting" and has more to do with slaughtering various dinos and tribals.

The Bad
WAYYYYY too much fog. Is the engine really that bad that they need this much fog to make it perform???

The Bottom Line
A classic- this one came out around launch of the N64. If you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for N64 action games you'll probably find this. Nothing really amazing, but not all that bad either!