Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

aka: Jikū Senshi Turok, Turok: Cazador de Dinosaurios, Turok: Łowca Dinozaurów
Moby ID: 2203
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Description official descriptions

The Earth is separated by an invisible barrier from the Lost Land, a realm in which time has no meaning, and which is inhabited by ferocious dinosaurs and aliens. For many generations, the mantle of Turok has been bestowed upon those who saw the protection of the barrier as their sacred duty. But an evil lord named Campaigner is seeking for an artifact that is capable of destroying the barrier, striving to dominate the entire universe. This artifact, known as the Chronoscepter, was broken into pieces which were then hidden away. Tal'Set, a Native American and the last Turok, must find the scattered pieces of the Chronoscepter, and stop the Campaigner from obtaining them.

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a first-person shooter with platforming and light puzzle-solving elements. Much of the game is set in outdoor environments, and requires the player to explore them by finding various paths, jumping, swimming, and climbing. The game's most notable enemies are dinosaurs of various sizes, though the levels also include human and demonic enemies, as well as wildlife. The player gradually gains access to thirteen weapons (plus the Chronoscepter, assembling which is the game's main objective); these include a knife, a bow, as well as high-tech firearms such as a rocket launcher and an atomic fusion cannon.

Spellings

  • 恐龙猎人 - Simplified Chinese spelling
  • 時空戦士テュロック - Japanese spelling

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Credits (Nintendo 64 version)

93 People (77 developers, 16 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 50 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 86 ratings with 7 reviews)

Turok is full of silly spectacles

The Good

  • Ridiculous in the best way possible
  • Fluid animation and terrific graphics for the time
  • Good sound and ambiance
  • Various novelties keep the game from getting dull
  • A plethora of weapons to play with
  • A lengthy campaign and good boss fights


The Bad

  • Cumbersome controls
  • Tedious and confusing level design
  • Distance fog is annoying
  • Platforming sections can be a pain


The Bottom Line
Apparently, Turok is based on a vintage comic book series called "Turok: Son of Stone." I found a few of those on my parents bookshelf as a kid, and they were relatively tame and fun stories about the titular Turok and his friend Andar going into a land full of dinosaurs they dubbed "Honkers." Unless there's a different Turok comic that I don't know about, it's clear that the developers of the game didn't pay much mind to the source material in making this the only similarity being that Turok is native American and that there are Dinosaurs in the game. The comics lacked the extreme violence and gore, let alone all the weird science that permeates this games universe.

Turok was actually a pretty big deal when it came out, the first person shooter genre was falling out of flavour around 1997 and the fact that Turok managed to stand out of the crowd was a shocker to most, especially considering the primary platform for the genre was PC and the fact that consoles simply couldn't power most shooters due to their graphic intensive content which required far sturdier hardware. Turok managed to garner attention by taking some fresh spins on the genre, without straying too far. The industry sadly ignored shooters that tried to be different at the time, with classics such as System Shock being buried and lost in time until much later on.

The premise and universe of Turok is absolutely ridiculous but that's a massive part of the games appeal. You play as a time traveling red Indian (Who proclaims "I AM TUROK" and seeing as the game is called Turok, I would assume is named Turok but hardcore fans of the series keep saying his name is actually Tal'set) who must stop some evil something or other named The Campaigner from dominating the universe by going into the past and breeding a race of Cybernetic Dinosaurs and using his advanced technology to arm said Cybernetic Dinosaurs, mutants, and regular humans with devastating weapons of mass destruction.

I'm not joking. It's juvenile and it definitely reeks of the 1990s, but who cares? I don't. The game wouldn't nearly be as fun without the insane background and events, because the game has numerous flaws and one of the largest ones can make the game incredibly tedious and dull: The level design. The levels are confusing, disjointed, and annoying. It doesn't help that there are numerous random encounters that lead to ethereal platforming sections or labyrinthine caves and sometimes you will accidentally step into one of these random events or you will be forced to go in simply because you need the ammo and health that lies within them.

In each level you must collect a series of keys to unlock the next section of the game, and you will have to run all around flipping switches and exploring every nook and cranny. It pads the game out and it can get extremely boring, especially when you kill most of the enemies and are only treated with more baddies to fight when the game decides to randomly spawn some in. This isn't helped by an awful distance fog. Apparently Turok has a severe case of near sightedness because you can only see about 3 feet in front of you at the most.

Despite the distance fog, the graphics are actually very good for the year it came out, let alone the platform. While not on par with Quake II the graphics are on par if not better than most PC FPS games released that year. The jungle is well detailed and you'll see wildlife such as deer, monkeys, and the like interacting with the environment realistically. The animations are extremely fluid and thanks to the animation, death scenes are a cathartic joy to watch and are actually still fairly impressive in a strange way even today.

The AI is surprisingly good as well, the enemies have a surprising range of behaviour and there is a great variety in them. Raptors are speedy and viscous, and if there are multiple raptors in the area they will rendezvous with each other before attacking you. Later on in the game, trained dinosaurs will work together with their human counterpart and their behaviour will change based on the status of one or the other. They all put up a good fight and challenge.

While the challenge is often fine, I will take issue with two elements of challenge that are quite annoying: Control and platforming. Your first instinct is to use the analog stick, right? Wrong. So how do you move Turok? The D-Pad? Nope. To move you have to use the camera buttons, and even then you need the stick to aim and the D-Pad to strafe. At least the A button jumps and Z button shoots. This is probably why Goldeneye didn't let you aim in real time, because controlling a shooter like this with that set up and that evil N64 controller is a pain in the ass.

The platforming sections are frustrating in part of the controls and in part to the distance fog. If a platform is more than 6 feet in front of you, you will have to squint just to recognize its faint outline if you can even make that out. Thankfully there is no falling damage (Though there are bottomless death pits), but it is still a pain to fall down a 50 foot drop, walk around until you find the climbable wall, and restart all over again.

On the whole, Turok is a mixed bag. It's certainly not as fun as it was in 1997, but for 1997 it was a very good game and its still fun to play for its violent and silly novelties. Cybernetic dinosaurs and weapons that put the BFG 9000 to shame keep the gameplay interesting, and if you have a thirst for blood the game has plenty of giblets and horrific death sequences. It should come as no shock that this game was controversial and even I was a little shocked back in 1997 to see such a fluid animation of a man grasping his neck as blood squirted out of an artery and dripped down his body. It's juvenile, silly fun, but time has not aged well regarding the controls, platforming, or overtly complex and confusing design.

Nintendo 64 · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2010

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is just plain fun!

The Good
- Turok is filled with pure unadulterated, Doom-like fun. Shooting dinosaurs and bad guys is just a blast, and keeps you pumped up.

  • For 1997, the graphics in this game are excellent. At the time, most first-person shooters were Doom clones. There was Quake, but that was only on the PC when Turok was released.

  • The atmosphere in this game is excellent, and so is the music. You really do get the "jungle" feeling.

  • You are a magical Native American who yells "I AM TUROK!" Can we just appreciate that?

    The Bad
    - The platforming segments in this game are often tedious to play. This is because, in my opinion, controls for first-person shooters on the N64 are dated and a little difficult to work easily, and makes it hard to platform freely.

  • Fog effects everywhere!

  • Boss battles, or just battles against bigger enemies, are a little underwhelming.

  • Not a complaint from me, but the game is very repetitive. This is fine by me, and actually adds to the fun in my opinion, but I can definitely see why others would find this to be a problem.

    The Bottom Line
    Turok is just a fun game. It delivers fast action, and more importantly, dinosaurs. No, it's not perfect, but it's still a pretty enjoyable game.

Nintendo 64 · by Ian Dawson (7) · 2013

At least a few hours of fun

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.

Windows · by Jackson Schwipp (18) · 2010

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

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Trivia

Console Firsts

Was the first 1st-person shooter on the console. It was also the first third-party release for the Nintendo 64.

Was released well above the price of other games for the N64. $80 in the US, £70 in the UK, and $130 in Australia. Higher than any other game for the platform at that time.

German Censorship

The German version of the game was censored. All human opponents were replaced by robots - some of them were exclusively modeled for this release, others were just taken from the last level of the game and used throughout all the other levels as well.

Japanese Title

The Japanese title translates to Space-time Soldier Turok in English.

Memory Card Goof

In the United Kingdom, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was the first N64 game released there to require an expansion memory-card in order to save your in-game progress. The only problem was, Nintendo had not yet made their official memory-cards available for retail sale in the UK. Scrambling to meet market immediate market demand, third-party accessory manufacturers were able to swoop in and fill the gap. A notable misstep by Nintendo which could have tanked the release of Turok for the UK.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack has only five original tracks from the game. There are also four official remixes included as a bonus. The soundtrack was released in 1997. 1. Technosaur Radio Edit 2. Deep Jungle Mix 3. Tyranosaur Club Edit 4. Rokozor 5. The Jungle 6. Boss Encounter 7. The Treetops 8. Lava Land 9. Campanier Boss Encounter

Songs from 1-4 are official remixes, and songs from 5-9 are general tracks from the in the game. The whole soundtrack runs just under 40 minutes.

Turok Origins

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is based on a comic book series of the same name, and not the other way around as most people seem to think. The series is published by Acclaim Comics and written by the great Fabian Nicieza.

Iguana, who were owned by Acclaim at the time, developed the original Turok. A year or so later, Acclaim merged Iguana and Probe, one of the other developers owned by Acclaim, into one single developers' house, Acclaim Inc.

Awards

  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • March 1998 (Issue 104) - First-Person Shooter Game of the Year Runner-Up (Readers' Choice)

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Game added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Exodia85, Alaka, DreinIX, marley0001, Mok, Talos, WONDERなパン.

Game added August 22, 2000. Last modified March 13, 2024.