A world where time has no meaning - and evil knows no bounds. Torn from a world long gone, the time traveling warrior Turok has found himself thrust into a savage land torn by conflict.
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Needs more dino hunting...
BEN TUROOOKKKKKK
YAYIMI OKUMU ALIRIM
T-REX BULURUM GÖTÜNE OK ATARIM
DÜNYAYI DİNOZORLARDAN VE UZAYLILARDAN KURTARIRIM
UGA BUGAAAAAA
YAYIMI OKUMU ALIRIM
T-REX BULURUM GÖTÜNE OK ATARIM
DÜNYAYI DİNOZORLARDAN VE UZAYLILARDAN KURTARIRIM
UGA BUGAAAAAA
A timeless classic, without a doubt. I've played the reboot one some years ago but honestly, this one is much better.
I am into old-school FPS games and this one is surely a must!
The bosses were a challenge, the whole game was a challenge at some point, but still fun and with a lot of guns to fight with. The soundtrack feels nostalgic, and the visuals have their charm. This is a hella badass game indeed!
I am into old-school FPS games and this one is surely a must!
The bosses were a challenge, the whole game was a challenge at some point, but still fun and with a lot of guns to fight with. The soundtrack feels nostalgic, and the visuals have their charm. This is a hella badass game indeed!
The Turok games are ones I’ve heard about but seen very little of for ages and ages. Up until now, the only thing that I really knew about this game was that I’d heard it had some quite annoying first-person platforming in it. In my recent haul of a pile of N64 games, this and its sequel were to of the quite cheap N64 games I’d gotten my hands on. I always love to see how western games localized for Japan end up looking, and especially given that only these first two Turok games (while not Rage Wars nor Turok 3) ever made it over here, that made it even more tempting to pick these up and see what they were like. It took me around 17 hours to get through the game on normal difficulty. I played through the Japanese version and used no cheat codes while playing on real hardware.
The actual IP for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (or as the game was called here, “Space Time Soldier: Turok”) was actually originally from a comic that started in the early 50’s. Upon learning that this was a property originally created in the Golden Age of comics, that made everything about it make a LOT more sense XD. You play a Native American dimension-hopping warrior that carries the name (and title) of Turok. It’s your job to protect the universe from all manner of danger that may threaten it, and in this case, it’s the evil Campaigner who threatens the safety of the universe. His aim is the legendary Chronoscepter, an artifact so powerful that it was broken into 8 pieces to keep it from ever falling into the wrong hands. It’s Turok’s job to traverse the Lost Lands at the edge of the universe and stop the evil Campaigner in his quest for universal domination!
That’s the story as well as I can remember it, at least, as it’s not really very important. Virtually all of the plot is in the manual, and it doesn’t really relate to the gameplay at all. However, this being largely an action-game, it’s difficult to call that a terribly serious problem. We don’t need much story to think about if we have enough things to shoot at, and Turok follows this philosophy very well. The premise and presentation of certain enemies certainly has a not insignificant problem with casual racism, but it’s also nothing that will read as particularly special in that regard for anyone familiar with western media from the 1990’s. It’s certainly not “good representation” by any stretch for any of the groups portrayed in this game, but it’s hardly unique in that regard, so I can only hold that against it so much.
The gameplay of Turok is a first-person shooter that clearly takes a lot of cues from stuff like Doom (as so many FPS of the time did) while also injecting some of its own ideas here and there. You have 8 big ol’ stages to travel and explore through as you search for the special keys that unlock successive stages as well as pieces of the Chronoscepter (if you happen to want a big Final Boss Deleter after the end of stage 8, which I did, and it was very appreciated to delete that awful bugger). You’ve got over a dozen weapons to do it with, and there are about a dozen or so enemy types that will try and keep you from your goals. It’s not super novel in the ways it does this stuff (especially with just how many of the weapons feel like they were pulled straight from Doom, even down to which guns share which ammo types), but I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Levels are fun to explore, enemies are fun to shoot with your guns, and the boss designs are (for the most part) fairly good, even if their limited AI often gets in the way of them being any more challenging than the normal enemies you have to deal with.
The problems that this game does have are largely where it tries to innovate. The biggest thing its trying to do towards that effort is have fun in 3D spaces, and that generally amounts to verticality and platforming, and the platforming in this game is pretty darn rough. You not only are locked to a first-person perspective, but you also can’t see your player model. Your biggest savior here is the map that you can pull up that overlays on top of your vision. While you can use that little yellow triangle’s position relative to the edges and platforms around it as a pretty darn good platforming aid, it isn’t perfect. There are plenty of places (both secret and otherwise) where the map just doesn’t show you where the platforms are, and just getting good at vibing out how far you can jump ends up becoming a very important skill in Turok, map or no map.
Aside from that, the issues are largely either subjective on my part or just mean design on the game’s part. It’s weird to say, but unlike a game like Doom or what have you, where there are only a fixed amount of enemies per stage, Turok has enemies spawn in but not respawn. What I mean by that is, while enemies will be preexisting in stages and more enemies can and will warp in to replace them, it’s seemingly up to the game’s whimsy which enemies happen to spawn and when and where. I can’t count how many times I thought I’d sussed out which enemies in an area would get a replacement spawned in for them after I’d killed them, they’d end up not getting a replacement spawned at all. Thankfully, you can at least hear the very distinct sound of an enemy teleporting in, but that still doesn’t stop the game from enemies spawning or jumping down behind you SO often in ways you could barely expect.
This lead to me developing an adaptive strategy, often rushing forward with reckless abandon just seeing what enemies (and traps) lie in wait for me until I died, then loading my previous save so I could more smartly deal with what I needed to and ignore what I didn’t. Figuring that out in and of itself was at first frustrating, but it ultimately became a kind of fun in and of itself. It’s certainly not how I’d prefer to play a game like this (especially with this control scheme), but I’d have a hard time saying whether it’s outright good or bad.
However, just how difficult enemies can be to deal with is something that wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if you were playing on hardware with a bit more accuracy. On something as accurate as a mouse & keyboard I would’ve had a lot less trouble, but with the awkwardness and relative imprecision of an N64 controller, I had a lot more trouble ^^;. Now, part of this is down to me using an aftermarket replacement joystick that’s far too sensitive, so aiming was always going to be a bastard on any shooter I played on this thing. But even outside of that, the auto-aim the game employs for your hitscan weapons can feel very arbitrary in its usefulness, and this is made no better by the lack of an aiming reticle for your guns. You can usually make do with how the yellow triangle that shows where you are on the map, as it’s roughly in the middle of your vision, so it’s a kind of makeshift reticle. However, that’s going to really start losing its effectiveness once you need to use non-hitscan weapons like the grenade launcher or the rocket launcher (the latter being so difficult to aim that I virtually never used it).
Then there are other issues that arise from the limitations of the controller as well, which really just boil down to “the N64 simply doesn’t have enough buttons”. Using the C-buttons to move and the joystick to aim was always going to be an imperfect solution, but this goes for double when A and B are your buttons to scroll through your weapon wheel. This is a double problem if you happen to be using the left handed mode where the D-pad moves you instead of the C-buttons (which I found woefully inferior due to the precision they want out of the button presses, so I gave up after an hour or two), but not being able to both switch weapons and move (or turn) at the same time makes a lot of encounters against spongier enemies a lot more punishing than they need to be, even if you already know what’s coming.
The worst part of all of that is how awful they make strafing side to side. If you double tap left or right, you FLY very far in that direction. I have absolutely no idea why they did this, as there are virtually no spaces large enough where that’d actually be an advantage, and it’s not like your normal strafe and forward move speeds aren’t fast enough already. All this amounts to is a ton of unnecessary deaths off of the game’s MANY narrow bridges over bottomless pits because you dared be slightly hesitant with a rightward strafe (and it’s not even like the game has a multiplayer mode that’d make this more advantageous against other players either).
At the end of the day, Turok’s controls are a really mixed bag. To a large degree, there’s not much I can fault it without just wielding 20/20 hindsight like a hammer. Given that you need Z to fire and R (or L) to jump, there’s really no better solution they could’ve used with this controller for switching guns. Perhaps less guns overall (and given how useless so many of them are, I wouldn’t say that’s a bad idea) would’ve helped a bit, and I’d say the level and game design with the platforming sections and enemy spawn stuff also make this just that much more awkward to deal with. That said, this was a still very young genre when this game came out, and there weren’t really enough games that gave you this degree of movement freedom to know that all this stuff was a poor idea. I think it’s still a bit too forgiving to just file it all under “well it’s an old game, so it’s gonna have old game jank”, but I do think that Turok is very much like most FPS games from this generation of gaming. You’ve really just got to be ready to hop back into an era when controlling an FPS on a console was still a bold new science being explored, because if you’re not ready for that, then trying pretty much any FPS on the N64 is likely going to be bad idea, dinosaurs or no dinosaurs.
Aesthetically, Turok is a very impressive looking game at the time. They used state of the art motion capture technology for the human enemy animations, and it REALLY shows with just how fluid and nice looking their animations are (for both fighting and dying!). It’s a bit annoying still that one or two death animations make it look like enemies are still alive, granted, but overall the care and attention put towards enemy animations was time well spent. Levels are well detailed and varied looking, but many worlds do share a lot of textures, so remembering your way around can be a bit tricky. Using your map is essential, because not using it means you’re probably going to get lost quite a bit with just how similar levels can look at times. The music is very nice and fits the mood very well, and the only downside I can start to think about here is the draw distance.
The draw distance fog is VERY close by, which can make some platforming quite awkward (especially with how the colored fog can make the map harder to read), but it fortunately only rarely makes enemies harder to fight. 99 times out of 100, you can see enemies before they can see you, and picking them off while they’re still out in the fog can be a very valuable strategy when the environment allows for it. The first footage I saw of this game made it seem like the draw distance issues were going to make playing it a horrid experience, but I was very thankful with just how wrong I was on that front. I can’t say the draw distance (and the slowdown issues that appear when there are a LOT of enemies on screen) aren’t a problem at all, as they obviously are, but they’re far less of a problem than you might imagine they’d be, and they’re way less of a problem than the stuff with the controls or the platforming issues.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Had I played through Turok on PC, I imagine I would’ve liked it a fair bit more (not to mention completed it faster XD). That said, I still had a good time by the end of it. It was very back and forth, with getting used to the controls/platforming and figuring out that often running was a far more valuable strategy than fighting being their own respective trials to overcome, but once I started getting the feel for it, I was having quite a good time despite how difficult the game was. Figuring out how to get past what was in front of me despite the control issues and enemy ambushes turned into a fun challenge all on its own, and I’m genuinely looking forward to playing the sequel (and not just because I’ve heard that it’s such a better game XD). If you’re into retro console FPS or you’re like me and you just want to check out some classic, lauded N64 games, this is one definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, if all that you’ve read about me complaining about the controls and the game design have made you recoil in horror, then this might be one you’re better off trying out on PC (if you end up playing it at all ^^;).
The actual IP for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (or as the game was called here, “Space Time Soldier: Turok”) was actually originally from a comic that started in the early 50’s. Upon learning that this was a property originally created in the Golden Age of comics, that made everything about it make a LOT more sense XD. You play a Native American dimension-hopping warrior that carries the name (and title) of Turok. It’s your job to protect the universe from all manner of danger that may threaten it, and in this case, it’s the evil Campaigner who threatens the safety of the universe. His aim is the legendary Chronoscepter, an artifact so powerful that it was broken into 8 pieces to keep it from ever falling into the wrong hands. It’s Turok’s job to traverse the Lost Lands at the edge of the universe and stop the evil Campaigner in his quest for universal domination!
That’s the story as well as I can remember it, at least, as it’s not really very important. Virtually all of the plot is in the manual, and it doesn’t really relate to the gameplay at all. However, this being largely an action-game, it’s difficult to call that a terribly serious problem. We don’t need much story to think about if we have enough things to shoot at, and Turok follows this philosophy very well. The premise and presentation of certain enemies certainly has a not insignificant problem with casual racism, but it’s also nothing that will read as particularly special in that regard for anyone familiar with western media from the 1990’s. It’s certainly not “good representation” by any stretch for any of the groups portrayed in this game, but it’s hardly unique in that regard, so I can only hold that against it so much.
The gameplay of Turok is a first-person shooter that clearly takes a lot of cues from stuff like Doom (as so many FPS of the time did) while also injecting some of its own ideas here and there. You have 8 big ol’ stages to travel and explore through as you search for the special keys that unlock successive stages as well as pieces of the Chronoscepter (if you happen to want a big Final Boss Deleter after the end of stage 8, which I did, and it was very appreciated to delete that awful bugger). You’ve got over a dozen weapons to do it with, and there are about a dozen or so enemy types that will try and keep you from your goals. It’s not super novel in the ways it does this stuff (especially with just how many of the weapons feel like they were pulled straight from Doom, even down to which guns share which ammo types), but I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Levels are fun to explore, enemies are fun to shoot with your guns, and the boss designs are (for the most part) fairly good, even if their limited AI often gets in the way of them being any more challenging than the normal enemies you have to deal with.
The problems that this game does have are largely where it tries to innovate. The biggest thing its trying to do towards that effort is have fun in 3D spaces, and that generally amounts to verticality and platforming, and the platforming in this game is pretty darn rough. You not only are locked to a first-person perspective, but you also can’t see your player model. Your biggest savior here is the map that you can pull up that overlays on top of your vision. While you can use that little yellow triangle’s position relative to the edges and platforms around it as a pretty darn good platforming aid, it isn’t perfect. There are plenty of places (both secret and otherwise) where the map just doesn’t show you where the platforms are, and just getting good at vibing out how far you can jump ends up becoming a very important skill in Turok, map or no map.
Aside from that, the issues are largely either subjective on my part or just mean design on the game’s part. It’s weird to say, but unlike a game like Doom or what have you, where there are only a fixed amount of enemies per stage, Turok has enemies spawn in but not respawn. What I mean by that is, while enemies will be preexisting in stages and more enemies can and will warp in to replace them, it’s seemingly up to the game’s whimsy which enemies happen to spawn and when and where. I can’t count how many times I thought I’d sussed out which enemies in an area would get a replacement spawned in for them after I’d killed them, they’d end up not getting a replacement spawned at all. Thankfully, you can at least hear the very distinct sound of an enemy teleporting in, but that still doesn’t stop the game from enemies spawning or jumping down behind you SO often in ways you could barely expect.
This lead to me developing an adaptive strategy, often rushing forward with reckless abandon just seeing what enemies (and traps) lie in wait for me until I died, then loading my previous save so I could more smartly deal with what I needed to and ignore what I didn’t. Figuring that out in and of itself was at first frustrating, but it ultimately became a kind of fun in and of itself. It’s certainly not how I’d prefer to play a game like this (especially with this control scheme), but I’d have a hard time saying whether it’s outright good or bad.
However, just how difficult enemies can be to deal with is something that wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if you were playing on hardware with a bit more accuracy. On something as accurate as a mouse & keyboard I would’ve had a lot less trouble, but with the awkwardness and relative imprecision of an N64 controller, I had a lot more trouble ^^;. Now, part of this is down to me using an aftermarket replacement joystick that’s far too sensitive, so aiming was always going to be a bastard on any shooter I played on this thing. But even outside of that, the auto-aim the game employs for your hitscan weapons can feel very arbitrary in its usefulness, and this is made no better by the lack of an aiming reticle for your guns. You can usually make do with how the yellow triangle that shows where you are on the map, as it’s roughly in the middle of your vision, so it’s a kind of makeshift reticle. However, that’s going to really start losing its effectiveness once you need to use non-hitscan weapons like the grenade launcher or the rocket launcher (the latter being so difficult to aim that I virtually never used it).
Then there are other issues that arise from the limitations of the controller as well, which really just boil down to “the N64 simply doesn’t have enough buttons”. Using the C-buttons to move and the joystick to aim was always going to be an imperfect solution, but this goes for double when A and B are your buttons to scroll through your weapon wheel. This is a double problem if you happen to be using the left handed mode where the D-pad moves you instead of the C-buttons (which I found woefully inferior due to the precision they want out of the button presses, so I gave up after an hour or two), but not being able to both switch weapons and move (or turn) at the same time makes a lot of encounters against spongier enemies a lot more punishing than they need to be, even if you already know what’s coming.
The worst part of all of that is how awful they make strafing side to side. If you double tap left or right, you FLY very far in that direction. I have absolutely no idea why they did this, as there are virtually no spaces large enough where that’d actually be an advantage, and it’s not like your normal strafe and forward move speeds aren’t fast enough already. All this amounts to is a ton of unnecessary deaths off of the game’s MANY narrow bridges over bottomless pits because you dared be slightly hesitant with a rightward strafe (and it’s not even like the game has a multiplayer mode that’d make this more advantageous against other players either).
At the end of the day, Turok’s controls are a really mixed bag. To a large degree, there’s not much I can fault it without just wielding 20/20 hindsight like a hammer. Given that you need Z to fire and R (or L) to jump, there’s really no better solution they could’ve used with this controller for switching guns. Perhaps less guns overall (and given how useless so many of them are, I wouldn’t say that’s a bad idea) would’ve helped a bit, and I’d say the level and game design with the platforming sections and enemy spawn stuff also make this just that much more awkward to deal with. That said, this was a still very young genre when this game came out, and there weren’t really enough games that gave you this degree of movement freedom to know that all this stuff was a poor idea. I think it’s still a bit too forgiving to just file it all under “well it’s an old game, so it’s gonna have old game jank”, but I do think that Turok is very much like most FPS games from this generation of gaming. You’ve really just got to be ready to hop back into an era when controlling an FPS on a console was still a bold new science being explored, because if you’re not ready for that, then trying pretty much any FPS on the N64 is likely going to be bad idea, dinosaurs or no dinosaurs.
Aesthetically, Turok is a very impressive looking game at the time. They used state of the art motion capture technology for the human enemy animations, and it REALLY shows with just how fluid and nice looking their animations are (for both fighting and dying!). It’s a bit annoying still that one or two death animations make it look like enemies are still alive, granted, but overall the care and attention put towards enemy animations was time well spent. Levels are well detailed and varied looking, but many worlds do share a lot of textures, so remembering your way around can be a bit tricky. Using your map is essential, because not using it means you’re probably going to get lost quite a bit with just how similar levels can look at times. The music is very nice and fits the mood very well, and the only downside I can start to think about here is the draw distance.
The draw distance fog is VERY close by, which can make some platforming quite awkward (especially with how the colored fog can make the map harder to read), but it fortunately only rarely makes enemies harder to fight. 99 times out of 100, you can see enemies before they can see you, and picking them off while they’re still out in the fog can be a very valuable strategy when the environment allows for it. The first footage I saw of this game made it seem like the draw distance issues were going to make playing it a horrid experience, but I was very thankful with just how wrong I was on that front. I can’t say the draw distance (and the slowdown issues that appear when there are a LOT of enemies on screen) aren’t a problem at all, as they obviously are, but they’re far less of a problem than you might imagine they’d be, and they’re way less of a problem than the stuff with the controls or the platforming issues.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Had I played through Turok on PC, I imagine I would’ve liked it a fair bit more (not to mention completed it faster XD). That said, I still had a good time by the end of it. It was very back and forth, with getting used to the controls/platforming and figuring out that often running was a far more valuable strategy than fighting being their own respective trials to overcome, but once I started getting the feel for it, I was having quite a good time despite how difficult the game was. Figuring out how to get past what was in front of me despite the control issues and enemy ambushes turned into a fun challenge all on its own, and I’m genuinely looking forward to playing the sequel (and not just because I’ve heard that it’s such a better game XD). If you’re into retro console FPS or you’re like me and you just want to check out some classic, lauded N64 games, this is one definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, if all that you’ve read about me complaining about the controls and the game design have made you recoil in horror, then this might be one you’re better off trying out on PC (if you end up playing it at all ^^;).
While I'm sure Turok was a great console FPS back in the day, today it's more of a novelty game. It plays like Quake without as much kick. The draw here is that some of the enemies are dinosaurs, which is cool but 80% of the time you'll be fighting human-ish enemies. The level design is pretty frustrating, some of the levels here take a whole hour to complete, and sometimes you can miss a collectable that is needed to progress the story since some of them are hidden while others are in obvious locations, so if you do miss a collectable you'll need to start the whole level again. I still had fun in some areas and I enjoyed the setting for this game.
I thought this was a fun game considering I picked up the CD-ROM for 6 bucks