Turok Review PS3

Turok is one of those game series that had its heyday years ago and every attempt to revive and reinvent the series has ended in utter disaster much like the Sonic the Hedgehog series. The newest iteration of the Turok series tries to relive the glory days of the original Turok release on the Nintendo 64. This new Turok is a step in the right direction, but has no relationship to the prior games in the series. The story is mediocre and forgettable.

Graphic and sound:

Turok uses the Unreal Engine 3 to power its environments and does a superb job of creating a realistic environment with high-res textures and character models. The dinosaurs move and attack realistically and are a pleasure to watch attacking the enemy soldiers. The game’s sound effects are average and even the voiceovers by Timothy Olyphant are average, but again, the lack of a good story line and script are large contributing factors.

Gameplay and controls:

Turok has a single player campaign and a multiplayer element, which is played in 1^st person perspective. The single player campaign focuses on the player, Joseph Turok, searching for his mentor Kane who committed various war crimes. The story is forgettable at best. The missions consist of infiltrating the enemy base while traversing the jungle environment infested with dinosaurs. The player has a range of weaponry to choose from, but can only hold two other weapons besides a knife and a bow. The player can choose to run and gun, attack with stealth, or use the dinosaurs to bait the enemy soldiers.

The multiplayer aspect of Turok has a few modes to choose from: Deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, assault capture the flag, war games, and co-op. Deathmatch is every player for himself with the winner being the one with the most kills. Team deathmatch is deathmatch with teams vying for the most points instead of a free for all. Capture the flag is based on player teams capturing the enemy team’s bio-toxin canister and returning it to their base. Assault capture the flag is similar to capture the flag except there is only one bio-toxin canister and teams take turns playing attackers or defenders of the canister. War game is an objective based game mode. Co-op allows up to four players to team up and battle CPU controlled enemies.

Overall thoughts:

Turok is another of those games that could have been much more. I think the original Turok and direct sequel Turok: Seeds of Evil should be remade much like Tomb Raider Anniversary with modern graphics and perhaps a bit of revamped level design. The game is not horrible, but the fun of killing dinosaurs or having dinosaurs kill the enemy soldiers wears out within the first hour because the story is basically nonexistent. The multiplayer had lag issues when released, which are supposedly patched now. Hopefully the next iteration will take the positives from this game and add a story players can care about.