Turok: Battle of the Bionosaurs

The Good
Turok: Battle of the Bionosaurs is an exploration action game exclusive for the Game Boy; it was made by Spanish Studio Bit Managers, which is one of those unknown studios from Europe run by a couple of talented, passionate people that sadly most of the times we never heard of. It was published in 1997 by Acclaim who owned the Turok comic and had a really good eye for outside mainstream talent. They wanted a portable Turok to go along with the N64 game at launch, but this is not a downport of that game. Isidro Gilabert and Rubén Ángel Gomez were the main guys behind this project, and devs since the days of the ZX Spectrum!! still active to this day with literally hundreds of games under their names.

The story is there, though all of it comes from the manual, you're the Native American time traveler Turok and your objective is to collect the chronoscepter pieces... or something... the current objective - not so clear -,
gain access to the next level by finding and grabbing three keys, so it is an exploration nonlinear game (sort of).

Levels are huge and it's very impressive that there's no respawning enemies, so you can wipe clear an entire area and the game will still remember (I always appreciate that). It has a password system, so when it starts feeling a bit too long you can rest from the game, and perhaps come back later. The character controls smoothly, with no lag, putting into shame many platformers for the system and even home consoles, made by studios with probably a lot more money than this one. The level of depth in the controls is just beyond believe, e.g.: you can climb stairs faster if you hold the B button. What GameBoy game does that?!
There's the: "outrageous firepower of 14 weapons!"- says the Acclaim press release - these, by the way, feels awesome to find and use but results in a minor nuisance whenever you want to switch among weapons looking for an specific one - with select + left or right -. There's also many different bosses and tons and tons of enemies. The graphics are really good, with nice animations and lots of details to convey very different environments throughout the levels.

The music by Alberto José Gonzalez Pedraza is fantastic with a lot of varied and rich action tunes which many times forces you to stop playing and just listen; or you hum as you play because is so rythmic and adventurous, that just suits the game. It's also one of the most extensive original soundtracks that I know of in the GameBoy library.

The Bad
The game is not perfect, nothing ever is. The different modes of difficulty just means needing extra hits for enemies and fewer for your character; that is, playing this game on easy mode is perfectly fine (and challenging enough)...
From the way the character hangs into the edge of platforms, you can accidentally hang when you didn't intend to resulting in cheap hits by enemies... also these and their bullets are sometimes unavoidable. The long jumping into other platforms requires a very precise last second jump to barely make it, and mind that falling from too great a height even at full health is an instant death... You have lots of hits, lots of lives, and you can earn even more, but whenever you lose one you start from the beginning of the level with respawning enemies.

The Bottom Line
This game is before all, ambitious. It rivals in complexity with some of the most beloved games of the system like Metroid II or Links Awakening, but it was made by a small Spanish studio so it was relegated to obscurity.

As the game progresses it gets better and better, it shows that they've really put their hearts into this. It plays well, has nice graphics, awesome music, beautiful level design, is the whole package and absolutely a masterpiece worth to be played that shines more and more as time passes.