Turok: Dinosaur Hunter

aka: Jikū Senshi Turok, Turok: Cazador de Dinosaurios, Turok: Łowca Dinozaurów
Moby ID: 2203
Windows Specs
Buy on Nintendo 64
$17.40 used on Amazon
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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)

No first-person shooters featured dinosaurs ... until now

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.

Nintendo 64 · by Katakis | カタキス (43092) · 2012

This game is a lot of fun!

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!

Nintendo 64 · by Ben Fahy (92) · 2001

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.