Retro Review : Turok for Nintendo64

Turok

N64

FPS

Back in the begging of the N64's life I was about 6, I only had three games for the N64 : Zelda, Mario and TUROK!

Turok was a unique experience to me, I had never experienced a first person game before and I also had never played a game with guns in. However, there was always one thing that made me love this game, Dinosaurs. 

Dinosaurs freak me out more than anything, they just scared me, even still I think jurassic park is scarier than the ring (Although anything was scarier than the ring).

Basically the aim of the game is to find the chronosceptre, which is a special device. You play as Tal set who is the current Turok, which is a dinosaur hunter. Turok, Unlike his 2006 counterpart, is an actual bad ass. He runs around and beats the crap out of anything that gets in his way, be it raptor, man or deer. Even when he dies he respawns and shouts 'I AM TUROK' that's pretty cool.

A great thing about the game was that it allowed you to use a crap ton of weapons, such as the bow, a knife and my favourite: the Pulse rifle (The real pulse rifle).

Even still now I enjoy running through the linear, yet somehow expansive world just gunning down whatever I want with a nuke or a missiile launcher. This is a major factor to what made the game fun, it isn't like today's FPS'; there is no health regeneration or zooming. No just you, a gun and a whole load of enemies.

The game starts quite abruptly, you just spawn at a spawn place and are basically told 'go forward', on the way a main objective is to find 'keys' to unlock a bunch of levels at the end of the first part. the first part ends after walking through the linear part of it, then it opens up into a further amount of missions through portals. This game really opens up and allows the player to really explore and kill dinosaurs. I even still remember the unlock all cheat RBNSMTH which I think stands for robin smith. 

There are a lot of hidden areas in this game, right at the there is a small cave with a gun located in it, this is what I loved about turok looking back. Despite it's linearity, it can really be quite expansive whilst giving a medium feel that suits the game. Blue portals open up with small trials inside that involve traps and pitfalls, hard to get through in order to get the health bonus and extra ammo but even harder to find in the first place.

In terms of controls, it opts for the classic N64 FPS' style, I.e C buttons move, analogue stick looks around and R fires. This also reverses for left handed players. It's solid, but the controls now feel a little bit awkquard. 

I love turok, that's obvious if you read this review. However, it isn't nostalgia speaking it's just the game. This isn't all to hard to find and doesn't sell for more than a few pounds on ebay. It's a great game that anybody who loves classic games, classic FPS' and just fun games should get....NOW!

This is definitely a buy. 

I'm giving this 8/10

TUROK Review for XboX 360

 Turok

Xbox 360/PS3

First Person Shooter

I love the original Turok games, with a passion. The games were so fun and were enjoyable titles for the N64 and I think the PC. So obviously I was excited hearing that a new Turok was going to be coming to the next gen consoles, especially after the underwhelming yawn that was Turok Evolution. This game should have been awesome, but instead we got this....

Ok, Ok on the box it doesn't look too bad, but if you were to play the game you would see.
In this version of turok, you play as Turok (Which wasn't even the name of the original protagonists) who is a marine for a future group of mercenaries. He is a 'bad ass' who once apart of an elite assassin team called wolf pack, but has disbanded from them to take wolf pack out on an alien planet somehow infested with dinosaurs.


Just before we start, this game has literally nothing to do with turok, except for the name and the dinosaurs. Nothing!

Gameplay: Gameplay is typical FPS fair. Controls are typical, right trigger shoots the gun, left trigger either zooms a bit or shoots a second gun if it's dual wielded. There are also a few things like evading by pressing A and a direction. Controls are fine, but at some parts of the game there was a bit of frustration where I had to use the dodge move and it didn't work.
In the game there are dinosuars and guards, in which surprisingly, the guards are the more dangerous. Both come in hoards and aren't too hard to dispatch. Dinosaurs however, are really not utilised well, I literally killed nearly every dinosaur by equiping the knife and just activating the quick time events.
Another thing that annoyed me was the randomness of the game, It just felt like a load of random maps joined by BS dialogue. Basically you are running through a jungle for the majority of the game, without giving away any spoilers, you end up in a cave. However after a constant romp for a few hours through a jungle without any special events except for a random assault on the base, you get a boss. A very random boss just appears in the game, it just felt stupid, for half the game we got loads of dinos but no bosses. However going to a cave, a very repetitive cave, we are assaulted by a very frustrating boss battle.


Graphics: Turok uses the unreal engine like most generic FPS', it looks decent still and looked pretty good during it's release. I can't really comment on the graphics.
However the aesthetics do get really repetitive as the jungle just decides to drag on, continuing the backdrop like a hannah barbara cartoon.Character designs look ok, but the facial expressions they give are really unbelievable and just detract from the game.
Dinosaurs are extremely boring, they are nearly always brown, and I think the only time I saw variation was with a few white velociraptors that appeared for about 6 seconds of the game.


In terms of being a turok game, this is shameful, actually it shouldn't even be called turok. This game from now on should be called Generok, because that's basically what it is GENERIC. It amounts to nothing, it doesn't even include any of the cool weapons that the original turoks were so cool for. Instead, we get SMG, Shotgun, Pistol and oh the obviously original pulse rifle....Woo. Turok does have the Bow and a Knife, which are staples of the orignals but then again brown was a staple to the last shit I took.
In all fairness, this game can be gotten very cheap, and in all fairness it is a cheap bit of fun....if your not a turok fan. I picked this game up for about £5 for the tin edition, I completed it in about 5-6 hours with little challenge.

I'd say it is a buy, however, it is only a buy if you find it really cheap and you have absolutely nothing else to do with your time.


I'm giving this game 6/10. So buy Generok at your own whim, it's ok and may offer a few hours of entertainment.