Turok:

Mediocrity at its finest

By Sith Lord Jim

©2008 Jim (James) McIntyre

The last entry into the Turok series, Turok Evolution, was the epitome of overhyped trash. It was quite possibly the worst game on the original Xbox. So it was understandable that it was with a substantial amount of dread, that I first put Turok into my 360 disc tray. I soon joyfully discovered that this latest entry in to the series elevates itself to the realms of mediocrity.

You play as Joseph Turok a new member of the Whiskey Company. Whiskey Company are tasked with bringing in Kane, the leader of Turok’s old team, Wolf Pack. Your squad follows Kane to a planet and promptly crashes into it. The planet is being terraformed and (big spoiler here) it is now inhabited by dinosaurs.

So now you have to battle your former team members, kill dinosaurs, and eventually defeat your old squad leader. Just don’t hope to find out why any of this is happening as story is apparently not much of a priority here. Who needs story when you have dinosaurs?

One of the greatest aspects of the Turok series has always been the wide variety of weapons and secondary fires available and this one is no different in that regard. Bows, Shotguns, sniper rifles, flamethrowers and a myriad of other weapons, Turok has it all. Yet this positive aspect is quickly outweighed by two factors.

Firstly bullets do not seem to do much damage regardless of what difficulty you are on. Unless you get a head shot, you can spend whole clips downing one guy. This by itself is not that bad an issue, but the problem is further accentuated by the second which is for the most part you don’t really need any of these weapons when you have the knife.

The knife when used right guarantees one hit kills. All you need to do is get close to an enemy, then when the screen flashes the symbol press the trigger to activate an execution sequence. It is easily possible to go through the majority of the game using only the knife. Even when a group of enemies surround you, they can still be taken down one by one with the knife, as they do not do much damage to you while you’re in the sequence.

If you have heard anything positive about this game it would most likely be about the cool execution sequences with the knife. You get to watch as Turok slits throats, jams his knife into eye sockets, and generally just induces lots of blood loss. Well if you are fighting a dinosaur that is. Apparently humans do not bleed. For me this was one of the most frustrating parts of the entire experience.

While I understand that it may have had problems getting rated otherwise, the massive contrast between the huge amounts of blood from the dinosaurs and the occasional sparks from the humans quickly disrupts any immersion in the story that may have been felt by the player.

The stupidity of the AI was often quite astonishing. The most memorable example was when I entered a room and saw three enemies and a few boxes. I sneaked past the enemies, then turned around and shot one. The other two enemies yelled and decided to take cover behind some boxes. Amusingly though they took cover on the side of the boxes I was on allowing me to dispatch them with ease.

The levels although full of many wide open areas are very linear pushing you from one battle to the next. The environments vary from jungles to large bunker like buildings, and then just to change things up jungles that have buildings in them! Thankfully these environments are nicely detailed, with the jungles being full of vegetation. The graphics are by no means the worst that the 360 has seen, but at the same time they are no where near the best. Like everything else in this game they are simply average.

The multiplayer is quite diverse with a good variety of maps and game types, but it does nothing to set itself apart from the myriad of other multiplayer shooters available. The worst thing I found was that the knife was still available to use in the multiplayer and was still just as ridiculously over-powered. If you are an Australian I would suggest avoiding the multiplayer, unless you find a group of Aussies to play with, as the lag combined with knife wielding players can be immensely frustrating.

Dinosaurs and lots of weaponry do not make up for lack of character and story development nor does quantity of human enemies make up for ridiculously cliché human enemies. Turok does not do a lot wrong, but it does not do enough right to make up for its lack of depth. From start to finish it is tediously average.

© 2007-8 James McIntyre

5/10

Filed under: Xbox 360 3rd Party Games Tagged: | " Propaganda Games", "First Person Shooter", "touchtone pictures", "touchtone studios", "turock review", FPS, propoganda, review, Turok, TUROK review", Xbox 360