Turok

Jurassic Saves

Another part of what makes the fun start to fade is that the levels are so very linear, which even the artful use of foliage can’t disguise for long — you’ll sometimes get two paths, but they barely diverge. Still another issue is that some sequences are so paint-by-numbers, you’ll be suffused with a bored dread when you spot them coming. Approach a factory-like base early in the game, and yup, it’s packed with the catwalks, steam pipes, and exploding barrels that we’ve all trudged through too many times before — you’ll march through it all in a kind of autopilot haze. Later in the game, you plow through hordes of bugs in a relentlessly identical string of underground tunnels that’ll give you flashbacks to that lousy save-Cortana level at the end of Halo 3. Even some spiffy A.I. can’t make those interesting.

In between these sleepy stretches, you’ll occasionally encounter storms of frustration where you have to decipher the one way through a given scenario. These moments can be small, like when a flaming barrel is tossed down some stairs at you. Our first instinct was to retreat or jump over it, and we tried that about 10 times before finally just shooting the barrel and discovering that, nope, it wouldn’t kill us even though explosions that close had nuked us before. Other times, these moments can be big, long, protracted fights…like any of the boss battles, which range from a T. Rex to a bomb-planting run in a reactor to a monstrous water snake. Universally, they’ll make you wish the game let you save anywhere, instead of sticking you with unevenly placed checkpoints that are never where you want them to be.

That leads us back to that barrel on the stairs. Sure, we were completely stupid for not just shooting the damn thing in the first place. But it wouldn’t have been so massively aggravating if we could’ve just saved at the bottom of the stairs and sorted it out. Instead, we were forced to incessantly repeat a long sequence between the last checkpoint and there until — duh! — we got it. The bomb-planting, water snake, and other bosses all follow similar patterns that need solving, and you will get royally pissed off on a too-regular basis when you’re trapped by one sequence or another.

A shorter way to say all that is that Turok’s pacing just feels rocky. At first, it’s chock full of “That’s awesome!” moments, and you’ll probably be as riveted as we initially were. But once the predictability and the frustration kick in, it’s a hard game to stay in love with. We expect a lot of gamers to start Turok, but not nearly as many to finish it.

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