System Played: Nintendo 64
Year Released: 1997
Year Reviewed: 2013
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is a first-person adventure game for the Nintendo 64, developed by Iguana Entertainment and based on a series of comics about a native American fella ...hunting dinosaurs, I guess.
The game is a shooter, but isn’t just corridors and monster closets, like a Doom.The levels are more like giant mazes (too big in fact!) with numerous paths and secrets to discover ...in theory that is. In reality, they’re just (too) big open spaces for you to get lost and die in, aided slightly by a Doom-style wireframe map overlay which you’re best off just keeping switched on and peering through it ...even though it’ll give you a massive headache.
There are 8 huge levels in all, each accessible via portal from a central hub, that is if you have the correct keys to open the door. There are a number of keys on each level, to other levels (if that makes sense?!), and some of them are hidden, depending on your point of view, either extremely well or extremely fucking annoyingly.
Before long, Turok becomes less a game of dinosaur hunting and more about trekking through every brown inch of every ugly level for the nth time, looking for any paths you might have overlooked which could potential, hopefully, maybe lead to one of the keys you’re still trying to track down... but probably won't.
I never liked the controls in Turok, even when all FPS games on consoles controlled like shit. Most dual analogue games these days move you around with the left stick and look around with the right, and this is sort of the opposite. You look around with analogue stick (which I suppose makes sense when you only have one) and move forward/back/left/right with the C buttons. This is just awkward though, and worse still, the Y axis is inverted on the camera, with no option to change (a real pet peeve of mine).
R is your jump button, because what could be a better fit for a shoddily implemented first person control scheme than arse loads of platforming across instant death pits? ‘GREAT FUN’ I hear you exclaim, and a fantastic design decision to give you a very limited number of lives and force you to restart you from the last, distant, checkpoint each time.
Well, at least there’s the shooting to fall back on, yeh?
No, frankly. You don’t get a crosshair, so aiming is imprecise, and you can’t afford to waste any ammo because there isn’t much of it, and the amount you can carry early on is pretty restrictive.
Enemies are your dinosaurs and these poacher/military/mercenary guys who are there for some reason. Wherever ‘there’ is?!
The MoCap animation on the enemies does look good ...I suppose. They move fluidly, but even this turns out to be a bad thing, since they’re too good sometimes at running around while you randomly take shots in their general direction, wasting that ammo you’ve not got much of.
Some enemies respawn if you loiter around or have to backtrack looking for overlooked keys but even so, the levels get pretty empty after you’ve cleared them out once. In a way it’s fortunate, because you don’t have the ammo to be killing them again, but it sure is boring looking for some of those keys.
On the whole, bosses are ...impossible!
The first one is a couple of humvee’s (?!) which just drive around you in circles, rarely even attempting to hit you but invulnerable to all but your best ammo, of which you only have a small supply. To then be follwed by a some ass hole soldier guy who you can barely hit, since he’s constantly running. You have to waste all your ammo trying/failing to hit him because the controls are horse shit. Plain and simple.
Boss 2, the Mantis, is beatable just because you fight him in a big square room, so you can just be constantly shimmying around the back wall (where the ammo respawns) while he just chases you, all braindead. Poorly designed.
Boss 3, the T-Rex (complete with Dr. Evil-style ‘Frikken Laser Beam’) is similar. He’s in a big room, so just keep strafing and you can avoid him for long periods BUT he has so much health that he’s still likely to kill you long before you can sufficiently chip away at his health bar.
The final boss is a Shao Kahn lookalike called ‘The Campaigner’ ...I’ve always wondered if he’s supposed to be running for office?!
There is a cheat to remove some of the games many, many shortcomings, making you invincible and blessing you with infinite ammo but there is no code to make the controls any less shit, or make the game fun to play in any way whatsoever.
N64 games are ugly. They always were, and time doesn’t do a lady any favors.
Turok is mostly set in outdoor areas, which means the draw distance is feeble, with lots of fog and bloom being about all there is to look at. What you see on screen just looks like a brown smudge, possibly in a toilet, maybe unfocused by all the water in the bowl.
The music is just a constant tribal drum ‘noise’. Fitting though it may be, it isn’t especially compelling to listen to for hours on end.
Having played this one again, it beggars belief that Turok on the N64 was ever considered a good game, even more so that people willingly forked over £70 for it as ‘recently’ as 1997.
You forget sometimes that FPS games on consoles used to be a joke, and Turok is a masterclass of the reasons why. It is beyond words just how NOT FUN playing this game is ...it hurts!
2/10
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