Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

The Good
When I was a kid, I remember reading these comics titled Turok: Son of Stone which my father had around for years. He was a fan of the adventures of Turok and his sidekick Andar. Over the years (post-Dell), the rights to the comic book were handled by Golden Key Comics, then Western Publishing, then Valiant, then Acclaim Comics. In 1997, in conjunction with the rebooted comics, Acclaim released a series of video games. The first one, titled Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, was a commercial success.

The game featured Tal'Set (Turok), a Native American tasked with protecting the barrier between Earth and the Lost Land. Someone calling himself the Campaigner is seeking an ancient artifact called a Chronoscepter. To prevent it from falling into the wrong hands, the Chronoscepter was broken up into eight pieces and scattered throughout the land. Realizing how very powerful it is, the Campaigner plans to use a focusing array to magnify the Chronoscepter's power, destroying the barriers that separate the ages of time and rule the universe. Tal'Set plans to find the Chronoscepter pieces and put an end to the Campaign's schemes.

Right at the start of the game, you are instructed to search for the central hub and use keys to open portals. Usually, you find these keys on a pedestal which is scattered throughout the levels, and quite a bit of exploration is required to find them. You also have to find one of the Chronoscepter's piece, cleverly hidden from view, and use it to defeat the Campaigner in the end. You can still defeat him without it, but it's going to take a long time.

Stopping you from completing your task will be a variety of enemies as well as dinosaurs that attack you for just being there. Soon not long after the game starts, you encounter poachers dressed in Tomb Raider outfits; then two levels later, you see warriors who make use of their peashooters; then eventually, you come face to face with robots that really don't belong in this game. Their death animations are nice, especially when they start by grabbing their ear. Their gurgling noise sounds excellent.

When it comes to weaponry, you start with a knife and some Tek Arrows, but as you proceed through the levels, you will be able to pick up shotguns, chainguns, and some alien weaponry. The more advanced ones, such as the Fusion Cannon, are capable of disposing enemies in one shot and turning enemies into statues. For this reason, I prefer the advanced weapons over the normal ones, since they can also interact with the environment, bringing down palm trees and such. Not that it helps you.

There are multiple routes you can take in each level, and that's a good thing since this is not something that was uncommon in other first-person shooters before the game's release. It also calls for more exploration. You can discover areas you have not visited before, collect more ammo and health. There are blue warp portals that have the habit of appearing right in front of you, and entering these portals is ideal if you are about to run out of health or ammo.

The graphics make full use of the N64's graphic capabilities and they are heaps better than the PC version. The HUD looks better, and basically everything looks superb. Most of the levels take place outside, and there are at least two levels that are inside as well, and you have to go through some caves to reach a certain point. Because of the way the levels are laid out, it is easy to get lost if you don't use the map.

Before the start of the game, there is a beautiful animation of the Iguana logo that deserves to be watched more than once. When you walk off the edge of a platform, seeing Turok fall to his death is a nice touch. It's a shame that other developers haven't thought of this.

Most reviews I read have criticized the use of fog on every level of the game. Although you can't see what lies ahead of you in the distance, it adds to the atmosphere of the outside levels. However, I don't agree that this fog should be indoors as well.

There are bosses you need to fight in the game, usually to get the last key in a level, but you won't get to fight them at the end of each level . My favorite one has to be the second boss, the mantis. I believe it is the only boss that proves quite a challenge, as it spits acid right near you and it is capable of jumping over you if it sustains enough damage.

The music is excellent, and the soundtrack to each level changes depending on which location you are wandering through. The outdoor levels have a soundtrack composed mainly with drums. The music gets more intense when you are fighting bosses. When you swim underwater, the music has that relaxing feel to it. As for the sound effects, the best ones come from Turok himself.

The Bad
Near the end of the game, you have to venture through this fortress and kill androids and other enemies along the way. This fortress doesn't fit in with the overall theme of the game, and just walking through it, along with going up lifts to access different floors, is a waste of time.

There are checkpoints and save platforms in the game, a concept I still haven't got used to. If there is some difficult task, such as jumping between pillars that are too far apart, the checkpoints are miles away meaning that you have to travel quite a long distance to get to that difficult spot.

The Bottom Line
I enjoyed Turok and wouldn't mind playing it again in the near future. The game includes some nice cheat code, some of them are quite amusing. I entered a few codes and got to replay some levels I enjoyed, but with the weapons you can't get until later in the game. I had a go at the PC version and the graphics are inferior in my opinion. For fans of the comic books will enjoy this game. If you haven't read the comics but still like the idea of venturing through a world inhabited by dinosaurs, then you will enjoy this game even more.

The Good
Lots of weapons, 6 huge worlds, and the funny sound guys make when you blow them up! This game has little to do about "Dinosaur Hunting" and has more to do with slaughtering various dinos and tribals.

The Bad
WAYYYYY too much fog. Is the engine really that bad that they need this much fog to make it perform???

The Bottom Line
A classic- this one came out around launch of the N64. If you're scraping the bottom of the barrel for N64 action games you'll probably find this. Nothing really amazing, but not all that bad either!

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.