The first time I picked this up, I gave up cuz it was very annoying to find the key that you needed for the next level, if something takes me like an hour to find then I am done dude. Second playthrough however, things clicked better, I was able to use the map more efficiently than previously... there were still some annoying parts of the game, but it's nothing a guide can solve!

I guess the thing that puts this game down is how damn ambicious it is, seriously, how the hell are you supposed to play this with N64 controllers!?

Overall, movement is fantastic, a lot of fun weapons to use and platforming on a fps.

Very of its time but also always to the point, almost arcade-y.

Something to point out about this game is the level and enemy design; the levels are not only good at making you go forward but posess a level of verticality you don't see often in retro fps' almost reminds me of Spyro on the PS1 with how open it remains. To this helps the enemies, that have a chance of respawning after you kill them, something like this could ruin the pacing but the way its done manage to always keep you moving and search for the next path, making it very dynamic, again, unless many other fps.

Pretty big oddity in genre, being an FPS from this era with a huge focus on exploration, platforming and a live system is enough already to make the standout and then it's about native american fighting aliens, dinousars and cyborgs. Kinda fails at what it sets out to do pretty badly but it's still has strong points that might make the game a decent time for those willing to put up with it's shortcomings.

I've more negative to say but let's start with the positives. Moving and jumping feels really good, the way you sway and the gun bobs while moving so fast feels appropriate but maybe offputting for some people. This is based off a comic book and if you didn't know this alreay it will make sense once you see the weapons in this game. Guns in the this game are awesome, even some of them becoming obsolete pretty fast and the game having to account you might not have the best tool for the scenario they are still useful and more than that designed to be the coolest and loudest thing. You got an autoshotgun, a minigun, alien gun that sends enemy into orbit and quad rocket launcher among them. Soundtrack is a banger, only listened to the N64 version (There's differnet OSTs for the N64 and PC version, both are available and tooglable in this remaster) so I can't say how the pc version fairs but go listen to that stuff now.

Unto the negatives. Level design is really bad. Gigantic levels whose goal is to get keys to unlock other levels in the main hub and pieces of a special weapon to defeat the final boss. The goal is to get a better sense of exploration which is also why the levels have been made so big, issue is that the levels are gigantic and linear anyway with the keys being placed along the path or in a short sidepath you can miss and the pieces of the special weapon frequently beign hidden in secrets, you can reload a save and basic exploration got me most of even collectables hidden in secrets but in the worse case scenario you need to replay a whole level and idea alone rightfully will turn people off. No real point to platforming or the live system, which isn't as bad as it sounds but accidentally falling into a death pit will make you lose some time and deaths are not particularly punishing either, your health resets and most importantly you loose the ammo upgrade if you got it, I think I've only died once because of enemies and the rest were misjudged jumps but I never got a gameover. Kinda weird that game starts spicing up it's enemy roster significantly only in the last 2 levels, not like opposition is much threatening despite it mostly being hitscanners since their attack rate is pretty low and so is their effective range even their damage on normal isn't high ignoring how generous overheals and armor pickups are, they are fun to fight still even solely for some of death animations.

As for the visuals the game is a mixed bag. Models look ok with today's standars but they're really well animated and accompaniend by great sound design and generally fun enemy designs. Levels are some of the ugliest looking levels in a shooter I've seen, they are so big it would've probably been prohibitive to decorate them throughly but man they're bare and ugly, I think on average each level has like 2-5 textures repeated for the enviroments, Duke 3D came out the year prior.

I suggest trying out this game looking for just a decent time out of a it and figure if you can put up with levels design, turn back on the fog since the game relies on it.

~fps retrospective 13~
Turok is a Frankenstein's monster sort of game in both gameplay and presentation. Akklaim one day decided to combine 2 of the most popular genres of the 90's; a 3d platformer collectathon and a fast-paced first-person shooter, which gave us..... Turok!!!!! It blends surprisingly well and I had a lot of fun I enjoyed the open-ended map design that they had a fair bit, it's very vertical. The weapons you get are pretty cool I think. In the presentation, they decided to combine the pre-historic dinosaur age with alien stuff; it looks cool and gets us some cool enemy designs. The final level was sooooo draining though it took so long to beat i felt drained after I beat the boss they did not have to make it that long.

The Nintendo 64’s first first person shooter is in some ways what you would expect from first person shooters in the early N64 days – something along the lines of Doom and Quake, but focusing a bit more on movement. I played this as a child but never got far, even using cheats I never quite understood what I was supposed to be doing. That’s because Turok isn’t just a shooter: it’s a platformer game where you have to find collectables.

The version I’m playing is the remaster of the game – it still has the look and feel of the N64 game, but with a few improvements, the biggest one being fog. Due to the detail of the original game, the render distance was extremely low, so fog was added to hide the lack of level. The PC version moves the fog much further away – it doesn’t remove it completely as the levels were designed with the fog in mind, so you’d just see all the broken geometry the fog was removed completely.

Even with the increased view, navigating the levels isn’t easy. They’re very maze-like and you get warped between different parts, with no reference point to help you get your bearings. It doesn’t help that the levels have little graphical variety within them. You’ll need to scour these levels in order to find keys to unlock later levels, so most of the game will be ambling around, fighting respawning enemies.

The gunplay, at least, it a lot of fun, with a great variety of weapons and lots of different enemies. The story (which you’re not told at all in the game) involves an area of space where things from the past and future exist, so while you start killing tribesmen and dinosaurs, you’ll work up towards aliens, robots and dinosaurs with guns. Enemies to become more bullet sponges as you progress, though, so you need to use more ammo.

Movement is an important part of Turok and it provides a great sense of speed. You run around and jump in a very fluid way. For navigating the main parts of the levels, it’s a lot of fun, but then you reach the many platforming segments of the game, and it all fall down (or you will at least, a lot). The movement feels great when there’s leeway, but it doesn’t feel precise enough for jumping on the many pillars the game requires you to jump on – and with the game’s checkpoint system, some of these jumps can be a good distance away from the last one.

Turok was definitely great when it came out, but I can’t really recommend it now. but it is a game well worth remembering. It has a lot of flaws, but the flaws are also what make the game unique. Turok is very much a product of its time, but is also a piece of gaming history, especially with environments that are much more 3D than previous first person shooters.

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.

A great master of a flawed but good FPS from the late 90's.

Things to note:
+ It's super fast and it feels great to move around and shoot, it feels like you are in a complete frenzy half the time, very satisfying
+ The original version shrouded everything in fog to be able to run it without lagging, in this remaster there is a lot less fog
+ The concept of playing as Turok fighting dinosaurs in open environments in a Quake-inspired shooter is a great idea, was refreshing back then when most shooters featured castle/industry/hell environments

- Half of the levels are very confusing and result in a lot of backtracking
- Respawning enemies
- You need to collect tokens to open up new levels, which really sucks the life outta the game when the levels become confusing to explore and you can't find them, it's really annoying and the game would be considerably better without it
- Some of the platforming later on can be annoying (there is quite a bit of platforming in Turok)

a very fun shooter hindered by old game design

oh yeah baby it has it all
+Platforming in a fps
+very limited ammo count despite
+respawning enemies, yep even with limited ammo count
+progress halted by collectables, wanna finish the game ? get all the little shinies, they are mandatory.
+a live system, in a game where you die when falling from platforms.
+bullet spongy enemies that replace the normal ones, specially at the end making sure you waste even more of your limited ammo to kill less and less enemies.
+labyrinth level design to make sure youre as disoriented as a mouse, add that with the respawning enemies and limited ammo, see what happens.

nope, i gave up and turned on infinite lives, a cheat already embed inside the game, you unlock it after reaching 10 lives, so the devs knew about it, besides the live system is very redundant when you can just save on a save station and reload to that save station when you lose a life, they are not that far apart, i saw a guy on steam saying the live system is necessary, i mean power to you if you like it brother, but if i can walk around the mechanic using another, i don't see much of a reason for it to exist other than ''it was what the other games where doing at the time''.

still, with all its hassle and annoyance, i still had some fun playing turok remastered, there is something about n64 games that can be some wild jank but still be fun as hell, still, would not play it with lives, specially since i can already avoid it by loading my save

Turok is a fine piece in fps history, and if "quake but everything is worse except for it having dinosaurs" sounds like goty contender to you, I'm sure you will be satisfied with this game. And with "quake but worse" i mainly mean the movement, which by looking at footage of the game you could imagine it is going to be at least smooth, which is not. Thes game's movement feels like they had your whole keyboard glued with mayonnaise mixed with peanut butter, and this is not a minor complain because this game really focuses on parkour. Good thing that you move faster when pressing two movement keys and that the game has an absurd coyotetime, because else it would be a real pain.

(About the Nightdive port on steam)
Overall not gonna lie, its a fun experience, but, really, the reason I'm rating it negatively is because of the price, because it being a game from 1997 you cant just put it the price of a modern independent game. Nightdive as always did a good job in bringing this game to be easily accessible for modern computers and I appreciate a lot the job of conservating classics, but the lack of any significance improvements, specially the lack of a fps unlock (The game is capped at 60), don't justify the price. Sorry.

Outside of its context, there isn't too much to say about Turok. It's a fairly standard shooter with a collecta-thon bend that doesn't really work out for it. Most other games that base progression on collectable items add more than you need to each level, but in Turok you need to find every single one of the keys to progress the game and with how massive the maps are, it's really a nightmare to find everything in some of the more open-ended levels. Luckily the more linear ones fare better. As a shooter it's not mind-blowing but pretty fun, Turok is fast as hell which I appreciate, but I have to question the choice of making most enemies respawn- ammunition is finite and some of the time you'll just find yourself running past them to save on it. These aren't massive issues and I had a decent time, but it's not a must-play.