Prehistorically Old-School
Turok returns from the dead, apparently just to frustrate us into wishing he hadn't.
Published: March 15, 2008
That the online matches are relegated to Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag (Co-op is just a one-off, three-level mode rather than being something you can do through the main storyline), again, show's Propaganda's insistence, for good or ill, to stick to the most basic of offerings. It's kind of hard to mess up "shoot everyone that's not you," but again, the wonky targeting makes this something of an exercise in anger management. If not for the fact that they'd included Accomlishments for both on- and offline play, I would have dropped the multiplayer far sooner than I finally did. Fortunately, forcing me to stick out ended up with me having a better time than I originally thought, as the level designs are definitely complex and riddled with enough pathways (and the occasional, rarely-used dino) to keep them interesting.
Turok, like maaany games this generation, is built off a modified version of Unreal Engine 3, though Propaganda rewrote many parts of the tech, apparently. The result is that it definitely has that "Unreal look" to it, but in some cases (like the odd streams of snaking water or the detail in the main characters) is ends up paying off. Unfortunately, this is an Unreal Engine 3 game running on the PlayStation 3, and as such, it's not especially optimized for the system, leading to plenty of instances of a chugging framerate, pauses to load/stream in content and more than a few instances of popping back from dying only to watch mottled, low-res textures get replaced by their normal-mapped friends.
If there is one part of the game that really holds up, though, it's the audio. Not only is there liberal use of surround sound, but the dinos themselves sound absolutely fantastic. When a massive, snaggletoothed monstrosity comes barreling into view, you expect to hear some kind of huge aural payoff, and Turok delivers in both thunderous footsteps and huge roars. The sound of knives puncturing body armor or a raptor head, too, sound great, and the music props up the rest of the visuals with a percussion-heavy bit of punch. The voice acting across the board is solid, but Ron Pearlman's pissy, gruff comments were at times all that kept me going. His performance really is fantastic.
It's just a shame that the rest of the game couldn't have been just as good. There are times when I started to get into things, where the story seemed like it was going to get interesting, but the constant die/reload/die/progress/die/reload process drained any last ounce of momentum or pacing that the game had at fairly regular intervals. It wasn't so much the rock-solid insistence at sticking to the old-school first-person shooter concepts that borked Turok, but that nearly everything else was somehow busted.
In a time when multiple contenders for Game of the Year were first-person shooters, it takes more than a bunch of standard game mechanics, twitchy controls and insane difficulty spikes to get a game noticed. Turok might be worth checking out when the price creeps a little lower to that magical $20 impulse buy point, but until then, you'd best stay away.
