Turok

What’s more fun than killing Nazis? As the Turok series and the Jurassic Park movies proved in the ’90s, killing dinosaurs! It’s in that spirit that Propaganda Games and Touchstone dusted off the name and a few other identifying traits of one of the Nintendo 64’s most popular franchises and used them to craft a brutal, intense shooter that feels as old-school as its roots. For some of you, that’ll mean a carnival of carnage that brings back the good ol’ days. But if you’re so over that, Turok is also the kind of game where fun can fade, fast and hard, into frustration. It all boils down to what you want from an FPS…

Killing Fields

As Joseph Turok, you’re the FNG in a military unit sent to another planet to capture a war criminal. Everyone hates you — not because you’re a Native American who’s better with his knife and bow than they are with their fancy sci-fi guns, but because you’re ex–Wolf Pack, the shadowy squad once led by said war criminal. So there’s no love in the air as you’re told to report to the armory for the inevitable training. Without spoiling a mini-surprise, we completely dug how the game slaps aside the tutorial cliché while still getting you up to speed without having to shoot paper targets to get there.

Soon after all that, you end up stranded on a planet that, not surprisingly, is crawling with dinos; you’ll spend the rest of the game escaping that mess. Like Gears of War (from which Turok seems to take more than a few cues), the whole tale is positively drenched in testosterone — burly men shout so gruffly at one other that you’ll be just waiting for them to bump chests. Most of the cutscenes wallow in macho sound and fury, rather than any meaningful storytelling, so don’t expect any surprises. Want to guess how Turok’s plot will unfold? You’re right!

Since the story won’t exactly mesmerize you, it helps that you have loads of pretty stuff to look at. Turok’s foliage and jungle environments are often spectacular, covering the spectrum from small moments like creeping through tall grass in pursuit of an oblivious guard to eye-popping vistas with brontosaurs frolicking in the trees while pterodactyls flit about overhead.

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