Turok Review - Xbox 360

The new Turok game comes to us with all sorts of baggage.  The original game that came out on the N64 was something of a revelation, a first person shooter on a console that moved away from the corridor heavy shooting that typified the genre in its nascent years.  Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was a departure in tone, taking on alien components and marred by absurd difficulty and muddy textures.  The following game let the franchise slip into decline, primarily relegating it to the status of one of the most squandered opportunities in gaming.

I’m Ready Turok!

The new game is attempting to reinvent the mythology with wholly new developers and a new publisher and by taking a fresh approach.  Turok is still native American but that’s about it.  As part of a futuristic military Special Forces outfit, he is sent to track down a renegade commander whose outfit he was once part of but abandoned under enough mystery to keep his new colleagues suspicious of his intentions.  While the story sounds trite, it’s handled with quality digital acting and voicework that it easily rises above its familiarity.

What of the staple element of the series, the dinosaurs?  Due to an attack on their ship, the subject of their pursuit crash lands on a prehistoric planet inhabited by, you guessed it, dinosaurs.  This lead to why the title of the game has lost the subheading “dinosaur hunter”. Your job isn’t to hunt dinosaurs; you’re hunting a person with a lot of dinosaurs in the way.

Cold Blooded Friends

This leads to some very unique features of the game given the mix of enemy A.I. you’ll be dealing with.  On many occasions, you’ll be taking out enemy troops when a group of raptors get into the mix.  For both NPC’s and yourself, the animal instinct of the dinosaurs takes precedent as they are immediately drawn to noise and flashes of light – otherwise known as “your gun”.  This constant change up to how you approach a fight keeps the game far more exciting than many shooters that get bogged down under a sense of sameness. 

As the dinosaurs aren’t hell-bent on only killing just you, their presence leads to some manipulation to serve you own ends.  You can hang back when enemy troops are approached by dinosaurs to soften up their numbers or let them become distracted by the lizards to more easily pick them off from a distance.   Launching a flare from your shotgun can draw dinosaurs to more desirable location, like enemy troops. I have found, however, the reliability of this tactic to be rather spotty.

The presence of human enemies, dinosaurs, and some other twists later in the game help keep Turok feeling lively and fresh throughout.  The game demonstrates some wonderful pacing, always introducing new situations or enemies just as the previous ones have been exhausted.  As a result, Turok comes across as a game that has been given a level of care and attention that should raise it comfortably above those shooters that only feel like they’re going through the paces.

Problems Bigger Than a T-Rex

But there’s one problem, and it’s a serious one.  After games like Halo and Call of Duty, there is an expectation that the targeting on console shooters will be addressed to compensate for the lack of precision inherent in the controller.  Unfortunately, what aim-assist there is in Turok is woefully inadequate.  Getting the reticule to move that last quarter inch often proved impossible and aggravating.  Even with an enemy only a couple of feet in front of me, the shotgun couldn’t land on its target.  Concerned that perhaps my FPS skills up and vanished, I had other editorial members of X-Play try out the game only to find the same difficulties with the aiming. 

What makes this doubly disappointing is that many admirable qualities of the game become deficits.  The clever A.I. of enemies, who will flank you and keep moving to avoid getting shot, only exacerbates the inability to aim with confidence.  It’s the dinosaurs, though, that really heighten the frustration. Most of them are nimble and can move with the velocity of the xenomorphs in Aliens so getting a bead on them will have you gripping your controller well past the point of comfort.  In the end, I used the knife far more than I would have liked to take care of the prehistoric critters because the quick-time controls for that weapon were more reliable.

While the aiming issue by no means makes the game unplayable what it does do is prevent the player from fully exploring the strategic possibilities of approaching the game’s challenges and instead rely upon certain weapons and techniques.  By virtue of this one fault, the game will force all but the most adept shooter fans to play the game as more of a cookie-cutter shooter than is should be, which is a pity, because the game has aspired beyond that in all other aspects.

The game also provides competitive multiplayer options with some well designed levels that are, once again, subject to the aiming issues.  The co-op play is not played through the single player story but unique levels that, while reminiscent of the single-player game, don’t feel to have received the same finesse and attention.

One Bad Move

In giving my score to Turok, I want to commend the team for taking thought and care in reviving a license that has for years been searching for a good game.    In the end though, the one flaw is located so at the heart of one’s enjoyment of Turok that the game manages to get in the way of itself.   The potential is here and I, for one, am looking forward to the next installment.

Review by: Adam Sessler