[4/9/08] Turok

[BlackKnight]

Turok

for XBOX 360

 

 

Game: Turok

System: XBOX 360 DVD-9, PlayStation 3 BD-ROM, PC DVD-9

 

 

Turok is an ambitious reimagining of the classic franchise that began with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Nintendo 64. While in many ways a thematic departure from previous titles in the series, the basic premise of taking massive firepower to a prehistoric world remains unchanged. Marred slightly by control and mechanical issues, Turok otherwise does a great job of dropping the player in the shoes of a bona-fide dinosaur hunter and packs enough gimmicks to hold its own against the waves of competing shooters on the market.

 

Joseph Turok is not the noble mystic you might have been expecting.

 

You are Joseph Turok, former member of the elite Wolf Pack, currently contracted to apprehend its villainous commander. Crash landing Quake II-style en-route to his base on an unnamed planet, Turok is forced to complete his mission of foot. Dinosaurs are only incidentally involved, ironically. The planet in question has apparently suffered some manner of temporal-distortion such that its plants and animals seem ripped directly for Mesazoic Earth. This is largely irrelevant to the plotline, however, and neither it, nor the fact that you come across real, live dinosaurs, ever seems like that big a surprise to Turok or his companions.

 

The flashbacks are heavily stylised and hued orange against the main game’s green tones.

 

Unlike the original game, Turok features a fairly sensible, if shallow, narrative behind it. Backstory is filled in by the occasional flashback, and a great deal of tension between characters is alluded to, if never adequately explored. Also alluded to is the fact that Turok is Native American but except insofar as it is used to explain away his natural skill with a bow this detail is simply a nod to the older games. Apart from these pieces of trivia, the game closely follows the sci-fi ‘bughunt’ convention of stranding a bunch of futuristic soldiers, all armed to the teeth, on a planet with monsters and waiting for the action to ensue.

 

You won’t want to let a raptor get this close too often.

 

A run through the single-player portion of the game will take a fair few hours. In the midst of other shooters erring on the side of short campaigns justified by multiplayer options, Turok does not skimp on the quality or quantity of its story mode. In-engine cutscenes are well distributed throughout the affair and voice acting is of an above-average standard. You will definitely have Ron Perlman’s coarse voice stuck in your head by the time you turn the TV off. One major grievance most players share involves the game’s checkpoint system. No ‘save anywhere’ option is allowed and the checkpoints that can be used are terribly placed. In some chapters of the game there will be an autosave warning every few feet. In others, an example being the now-infamous elevator sequence, you will be put through a 30 minute gauntlet again and again, each time likely reaching the very end only to die at the hands of some sneaky, unseen assailant just before the next checkpoint clicks over. It doesn’t help when the game makes use of the oft-copied Halo-esque recharging lifebar mechanic – Turok can go from full life to zero after a single barrage of gunfire.

 

The weapon loadout is not as exotic as stalwart fans might have hoped.

 

The bulk of the action does fall under the shooting category too. Turok’s arsenal is comprised of all the FPS mainstays like submachine guns, shotguns, chainguns and rocket launchers. Hardcore fans will lament the exclusion of any more exotic weapons (no Alien Weapon or Chronoscepter this time), but the rest of us will be given pause by the lack of stopping power any of the guns offer. Most enemies seem to be able to shrug off every second shotgun blast, even at close range. Before long this will strike you as a major problem, especially on higher difficulty sections where halting a stream of hostile fire, even momentarily, can mean the difference between life and death. If you had the tools to stun said hostile, that is.

 

You’ll need the heavy firepower of the chaingun to knock a dino off its feet.

 

Fighting dinosaurs also becomes a nightmare because, combined with a mechanic that sees you knocked off your feet by most dino attacks, there is no real way to put down a Velociraptor when it is charging at you. You will get knocked down and you will take fire from any nearby soldiers. Again, on tougher settings, this can result in a swift and unavoidable demise. This problem is made all the worse by the apparent lack of any auto-aim or aim assist feature in Turok. After a game of Call of Duty 4, where all that is needed to target is a quick press of the left trigger, Turok will feel downright broken. Especially when the faster dinosaurs can literally run rings around you and absorb a truckload of SMG fire, taking one down becomes an extremely frustrating endeavour.

 

There is no greater thrill in Turok than sneaking up behind someone, knife in hand.

 

Luckily Joseph Turok has held onto a few special ‘Primitive Weapons’ from his time with Wolf Pack; namely the combat knife and bow. These are the most effective and satisfying weapons to use, if used properly. The combat knife, not unlike the chainsaw bayonet from Gears of War, is a close-range instant-kill weapon that involves a few seconds of complete vulnerability while being used. Unlike its noisy counterpart, the knife is a stealthy method of dispatching prey. They won’t hear it coming, and unless another soldier sees you knifing their comrade, the kill will go undetected. What makes the knife special is that all non-boss enemies are vulnerable to it. Tackling a raptor and slitting its throat is just as satisfying as laying down some moves straight out of The Hunted on unsuspecting human troops. On every difficulty except Inhuman, the knife can take down any enemy. This makes brawls with 5 or 6 raptors inconsequential – they more or less line up for slaughter and Turok is virtually invulnerable while dispatching each. Unfortunately the same trick doesn’t work against groups of soldiers or on Inhuman, where taking a knife to a firefight is, as in real life, a pretty moronic idea.

 

Long grass provides enough cover to draw the bow to full tension if you stay low.

 

The bow is a precision weapon that takes the instant-kill concept long range. Although drawing an arrow to full tension in anticipation of a shot takes practice, the ability to pin a corpse to a wall with a shot through the torso, incapacitate a man through the knee or eliminate a foe altogether with a clean headshot make mastering this weapon a top priority. It may sound difficult to wield but is actually surprisingly enjoyable once you get the hang of it. Tek arrows add an explosive tip and a shorter flight trajectory to the otherwise archaic weapon later in the game, and overcompensating for the weight while trying to knock ‘lurkers’ out of trees is one of the single-player campaign’s highlights. Between this tool and the knife, silent hunting, stalking and flanking enemy formations are all possibilities. There will be more than a couple of opportunities to clear an entire enemy encampment unseen, unheard and without attracting any unnecessary reinforcements.

 

Sometimes it’s best to let the dinosaurs do your job for you.

 

A severely underplayed and underdeveloped but promising aspect of the game is the dinosaurs’ neutrality. They will attack the player, the enemy forces and even each other just as readily. Further, by use of flares, the creatures can be lured to a certain point or, if something is tagged with the flare, to attack a target directly. Admittedly this mechanic is little more of a novelty in the easier modes, decisive use of flares in extended conflicts is required to survive through Inhuman. Although interesting to experiment with, one can’t help but wish more weapons than the flare-attached shotgun were available and that there were more ways in which the dinosaurs could be manipulated. In any case it offers a pleasant third way of entering the fray, with neither stealth nor blazing guns in tow.

 

High land usually offers some picturesque vistas.

 

At no point does Turok try to set a technical benchmark with its graphics. Considering all the Unreal Engine 3 licensees out there, Turok is definitely not the best use of the technology. It does maintain a very consistent minimum of 30 frames, however, and shows off perhaps some of the more creative uses of the engine so far. From panoramas stretching into the distance to the individually-placed blades of grass, the prehistoric world presented is authentic and decidedly pleasing to the eye. This sense of ‘authenticity’ extends especially to the dinosaur cast where every detail of the handful of species featured seems painstakingly realised. Even the most knowledgeable dino-buff would be hard pressed to spot a factual discrepancy in the proportion or design of anything in Turok, except of course with the fictitious sabretooth-like Lurkers, the insidious insects or one of the game’s later bosses in particular.

 

Prying open a raptor’s jaws will come up, once or twice.

 

Animation is another area in which painstaking effort has obviously been invested. From the first knife kill early in the game one can’t help but feel that some of the most talented motion-capture technicians alive worked on this project. Knife choreography is only one half of it though – the creature movements are spot on and what will really drop jaws to the floor. Whether we take the lithe raptors, the bullish Parasaurs or even the monstrous Tyrannosaur that routinely crashes through battlegrounds sending troops flying, the animations are incredibly natural and sickeningly convincing. Turok frequently borrows God of War’s context-sensitive input sequences for instances where, say, the player is tackled to the ground and has to pry the jaws of his or her attacker open. Replace the Hydra with a T. rex and you have roughly the right idea. Along with creating a sense of immediacy and desperation, these parts serve to reinforce just how good the animation in this game is and do a great job of breaking up any sense of tedium that might have otherwise set in.

 

A Tyrannosaur’s roar is one of the few sounds that will flood across all channels at once.

 

Turok spared no expense in the audio department either. The score subtly evokes the feeling of the hunt – tribal drums and other distinctly ‘jungle’ effects create a mood that mirrors the player’s experience closely. Tracks progress dependant on enemy awareness and attack formations so expect the music to quickly pick up in tempo when Turok is spotted, and to die down again when a retreat is ordered. Considering the prominence of hunting itself, the 5.1 soundscape can substitute for your eyes when lying low to the grass or a concealed hiding place make visual confirmation of threats impossible. Every footstep and birdsong is mapped with a careful attention to spatiality and this is definitely a game where using your ears pays off.

 

At some points dinosaurs will be the least of your problems.

 

Saying online in Turok is ‘a mixed bag’ sounds like a copout but it is all too true. While there are some interesting modes there are a few too many little problems that all but ruin the multiplayer experience. 5 modes are available; Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Assault CTF and Co-op. The first 3 speak for themselves. Assault CTF takes a nod from Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode whereby teams take turns attacking an enemy base, in this case to grab their flag, while the other team defends. After a point or a set amount of time expires, the teams switch over. Co-op is a mini players vs. the CPU affair that plays out like short mission-based single player levels. While genuinely fun, there are only 3 available maps for this mode and will inevitably grow stale over time.

 

The Pulse Rifle can be a big help in clearing out turret positions in Co-op.

 

The main problem is that the gametype, ruleset and map choice aren’t things you can choose when looking for a match online. In fact, except where you create a private game for friends only, all parameters are set by the server during automatic matchmaking. This means if you’re always getting the same factory level for CTF, or if you can’t seem to find a game set in that one Co-op map that you haven’t finished yet, tough luck. What makes this poor design choice utterly asinine is the fact that the recent ‘Velociraptor’ DLC map pack is virtually unplayable. Maybe due to the scant number of people who actually shelled out 400 MSP for it – who knows? – it is almost impossible to find a game on any of the new maps. You can’t individually select them yourself, and are invariably going to be stuck playing the same content on the game disc over and over until by blind luck you find a game using the DLC.

 

You’ll be on the receiving end of a lot of these when playing online.

 

Although Turok borrows a number of ideas from the current status quo in shooters, there are no selectable characters, roles or weapon loadouts to be had. No default weapon settings. No Unreal Tournament mutators. No Call of Duty perks. Nothing. A good faith addition would have been the ability to toggle knives in multiplayer off. Knifing is rampant online, to say the least, and where in Gears you can get off a burst of fire to disrupt the chainsaw, in Turok no clear defense exists. Bearing in mind that not even a point blank shotgun shell can properly stun that knife-wielding maniac charging you, the lack of a disabling option is frustrating.

 

Slade and Cowboy wonder where all the single-player achievements went.

 

For a game that can certainly stand on the merits of its solo gameplay alone, the achievements are distributed rather oddly. Anyone without an Xbox Live connection will be dismayed to learn that around 70% of Turok’s gamerscore is devoted to online-only achievements. I have finished the game once on each difficulty setting and have been playing on and off since its release in February. Despite this my overnight rental of Call of Duty 4 was more generous with the points, netting me 320G for about 4 or 5 hours of play as compared with 255G from Turok which I have played for Heaven knows how long. As someone who, due to latency and timezone facter, hardly gets to play online much, the achievements in Turok are quite dissatisfying.

 

Despite the Aliens-ripoff plotline, Turok’s campaign is enjoyable.

 

You can’t review a shooter on the 360 without paying lip service to the legions of competing games out there. Turok is not the most original, the most technically proficient or the best online shooter out today. It’s plotline is painfully derivative and it is not even a decent throwback to the franchise’s mystic roots. However, there is plenty of fun to be had with Turok. Hunting dinosaurs, using them against your enemies and slitting their throats are all things on a different strata of coolness to your average FPS. Animation, soundwork and voice acting get my nod of approval, as does the length and quality of the campaign mode. The bosses are engaging, you never really have to backtrack and new types of enemies keep showing up until the (literally) explosive finale. This is not to say the multiplayer portion was neglected at all – it may have a few surface problems to deal with but the gametypes and content available are broad and better than the usual fare, if not of Halo 3 standards. Finally the aiming could use a few tweaks, but there is more than enough to distract you from that.

Turok doesn’t break new ground but it does inject enough freshness into an often-used formula to earn it a solid recommendation. Whether the imperfections in its execution are enough to deter you will depend on just how big a deal you think being in the jungle with dinosaurs is. To me, nothing could be a bigger draw. If you take it for what is though, not expecting Bioshock or a remake of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, who knows – you might be pleasantly surprised with what you find. Turok has spent the most time in my 360 out of any game I own and, while I know that is probably just me, there is a free demo out on Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. So unless you have a specific thing against dinosaurs or, so help you, Native Americans, I strongly recommend you take Turok for a spin.

 

Story: 7/10

Gameplay: 7.5/10

Graphics: 7.5/10

Presentation: 9/10

Multiplayer: 8/10

 

Overall: 7.5/10

 

Grade: B

[L.S.D]

Look like you love the game a lot. Frankly, I can't get thru even the first hour due to boredom. But since this applies to almost every FPS i played on X360 except Orange Box, I would say that is just me then

[fumanchu]

im way to busy with frontlines fuel of war,gonna get round to turok eventually.

[BlackKnight]

It's funny... Half-Life 2 is the shooter that's bored me the most. Ever. I can barely get through 30 mins at a time. Needless to say I have never finished it even though I own The Orange Box.

[2eyez]

I'm not much of a shooter type lover.

[Alpha]

Shooters can get boring for me very fast. The only shooter I sort of enjoyed playing was Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64, mostly because of the awesome multi-player. Other than that, most first person shooters lack innovation for me. They all seem so cut and dry, same thing, over and over again. Although, I've heard a lot of great things about Bioshock and Portal doing something different.

 

I also tried playing Crysis a while back. It was fun for a little while, but then I lost interest.

[Inky]

Shooters can get boring for me very fast. The only shooter I sort of enjoyed playing was Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64, mostly because of the awesome multi-player. Other than that, most first person shooters lack innovation for me. They all seem so cut and dry, same thing, over and over again. Although, I've heard a lot of great things about Bioshock and Portal doing something different.

bioshock has a really good story IMO. and Portal isn't really a shooter at all, more like a first person puzzler. Portal may be the best 3 or 4 hours you can find in gaming right now.

[Agozer]

Give me Red Faction any day.

 

On-topic, I'm glad someone likes Turok, seeing how it's been mostly ripped to shreds by many online reviewers. Every FPS needs to have at least a few fans.