Turok Game Guide

The story bears no resemblance to the Turok games of yore. It's the spacefaring future, and as Joseph Turok, you join a military team called Whiskey Company that is tasked with capturing your former mentor, Kane. The plot itself is entirely uninteresting, but Turok's mysterious flashbacks and the tension that builds between him and Whiskey teammate Slade keep things flowing.

Unsurprisingly, you spend a big chunk of time shooting at dinosaurs, and they are indeed the stars of the extraterrestrial jungle. In Turok, however, humans seem to have developed within the same evolutionary tree as the raptors, considering that they exhibit approximately the same level of intelligence. It's an annoying issue that gets even more frustrating in a few late-game levels, in which a friend with a chaingun can do as much damage to you as an enemy with a rocket launcher.

As if to compensate for the dull artificial intelligence and resulting lack of legitimate challenge, developer Propaganda Games chose instead to implement a difficulty level based not on keen AI or legions of enemies, but instead on player disorientation. Turok isn't challenging; it's cheap.

To help ease one of the more common complaints with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game, the PC release supplements the checkpoint saves with a quicksave and quickload feature. Sadly, quicksaves are broken, and using them can disrupt scripted events and cause other noticeable and inexcusable issues. In spite of these issues, Turok still shines whenever dinosaurs take center stage, particularly when you put aside the conventional weapons and rely on your trusty blade. Although the largest maps support up to 16 players, we never found that many people playing at one time, so your deathmatches may end up being one-versus-one games that end before the target kill count is reached. The tiny online population means that the multiplayer's claim to fame-- computer-controlled dinosaurs that periodically respawn to create havoc--will go unnoticed. Sadly, aside from the dinosaurs, there's nothing particularly memorable or exciting about Turok, and it certainly doesn't meet the high standards set by other modern shooters.