Another release in the Turok range from Touchstone\Propaganda Games. Turok is a First-Person Shooter takes you to a futuristic world of pre-human monsters spacecraft.
You take the controls of Joseph Turok, a former member of a fierce Special Forces unit "WolfPack" until a falling out sees him transferred to a new squad assigned to take out his former leader Roland Kane. After the spacecraft crashes on a thick jungle world full of dinosaurs and futuristic enemy soldiers. As you make your way across the levels to another chunk of the spaceship, you team up with a few other squad members, some quickly meeting their fate, before killing Kane and a variety of large Dinosaurs including a T-Rex before making your way back to earth. The storyline starts off quite nicely with various flashbacks introducing the characters and events that lead up to the point of gameplay you take over. Then it seems to die out, seemingly missing something making you feel unimpressed. If it wasn't for the dinosaurs, you'd have a rather mediocre game indeed.
The graphics are rather last generation, square edges where something should be rounded and some plain textures at times, but the dinosaurs really do come to life quite nicely making you think you’re running around Jurassic Park with their realistic movements and colours. The sound receives two thumbs up with its instrumentals and the roars of the various dinosaurs.
The gameplay is strikingly similar to all other first person shooters not offering anything new other than scenery and dinosaurs. Something that was decent was the ability to brandish two weapons at once, meaning the left mouse button fired the left hand gun while the right mouse button fired the other. This was greatly appreciated when you run out of ammo, instead of quickly hiding or being forced to take hits while Turok unclips and insert the new magazine, you can fire the secondary weapon making you a more effective killing machine. There is also plenty of ammo lying around, as soon as you kill an enemy, your ready to replenish your inventory of sub machine ammo so you'll always have a full stockpile. There are some helpful tips on the loading screens, and the ability to ask for hints on your current task, but these sometimes don't help much leaving you with no idea on how to pass a particular boss or area. Stealth is also implemented, meaning you can sneak up on some enemies and use your knife or the crossbow silently without drawing attention to yourself or wasting too much ammo. This is also optional, you’re not forced to use stealth, meaning you can run full force into a battle and start spraying ammo at random targets. The acting was a bit macho, but nicely plays out with the various cut scenes in the midst of the action.
Multiplayer is a must have addition to the First Person shooter variety nowadays. With team death match, capture the flag, war games, and assault capture the flag missions each supporting up to 16 players (with dinosaurs thrown into the mix), your sure to have fun.
There are a few fine details missing from this game, for a 2008 release it seems rather unimpressive when compared to the First Person Shooter Super-Games such as COD4 or Crysis. Turok just doesn't quite get its foot in the door. It certainly was fun stealthily driving a knife into a dinosaur watching in a second person veiw cut scene, something new that gamers haven’t really had much of a chance to experience, but it's also easy to criticise Turok for what it's missing. FPS fans will have fun with this, but not at new release prices.
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