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Turok

First Person Shooter
Releases: 02.05.08
Propaganda Games
Touchstone
ESRB: Mature

Turok

Chronic mediocrity takes the form of futuristic dinosaurs.

by Sarah Schutz

Turok is not, necessarily a bad game, but its downfall is, rather, that it fails to do anything especially shocking or unique and give us a reason to spend our precious hours of gaming shooting baddies on a dinosaur-ridden planet rather than shoot more formidable foes in more elegantly executed games. The game is chronically mediocre.

Turok is vaguely reminiscent of Jurassic Park as you land on a terraformed planet on which the evolutionary process has gotten itself terribly out of whack. Along with the more reptilian enemies, you are fighting against humans determined to stake their claim and engage in, no doubt, the evilest of war crimes. The plot feels fairly irrelevant and isn’t, by any means, strong enough to carry the weak gameplay. Essentially, you are Turok, a Native American combatant thrust into this prehistoric world, forced to fight to stay alive with whatever weapons are available to you (guns, grenades, knives), but most closely your trusty bow and arrow (stereotypical, I know, but at least they acknowledge the triteness in-game).

The gameplay follows most traditional first-person-shooter rules and regulations, though an ineffective automatic lock-on system makes targeting severely annoying. While the combination of dinosaur and human enemies make for a bit of variety and potentially provides exciting gameplay . . . in theory . . . in execution it just becomes annoying. With no radar or other method to be warned off approaching baddies, the dinosaurs and friends will often swarm with a vengeance, leaving you with no opportunity for recourse. And this swarming occurs not in a challenging, realistic manner, but in a “we didn’t entirely think this out” way since advancing in the game becomes a painfully lucky process rather than requiring good old gaming skill. Not to mention that many of the dinosaurs are so darn charming that I feel guilty attacking them.

As a more recent fan of co-op gaming, I found it particularly appalling that the game only has a few online co-op missions. You spend most of the solo campaign with a brute colleague, so it doesn’t take a mental leap to consider a co-op campaign: yet another opportunity missed. As evidenced by the achievement point focus on multiplayer, this game was seeking to compete with the big boys (or girls) like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. COD4 and Halo have, already, set a precedent and built up a following. The gameplay of the reigning champions is so precise and well constructed that logging on to Turok’s servers only serves as a reminder that Halo 3 and COD4 truly are the cream of the crop and deserve your undying multiplayer FPS attention. If it ain’t broke . . . why pursue a lesser substitute?

If you are craving a new FPS experience, Turok might be worth a play-through, but the single player campaign experience is quite a dud, though the dinosaurs and terraformed environments offer some fun eye candy. Multiplayer offers some variation on gaming’s biggest trend, but will require some gameplay adjustment. Turok is by no means revolutionary, but offers a change of pace if you don’t want something entirely new. Mediocrity comes in many forms.

Dinosaurs make for scrumptious eye candy.

Messy FPS controls make for mediocre gameplay.

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