This short review is based on the PC version.
● Short - The game is about 6-8 hours long. I blew through it in a single sitting.
● Quality assets - The game boasts outstanding modeling, animations and rigs. Texturing for the dinosaurs and many characters are brilliant.
● Dinosaurs - They kick ass. The T-Rex is monstrous, the Raptors are vicious and menacing, and the weird raptor/gecko things are sinuey and creepy as hell. They all move like you’d expect them too, and they are all extremely easy to kill with the knife. That last bit kinda sucks.
● Quality voice acting - Touchstone brought in some great voice talent to flesh out the characters. Ron Perlman, Powers Boothe, Donnie Wahlberg, Christopher Judge, and Gregory Cruz to name a few. I think it’s expected that Perlman’s character has the best performance.
● A failed attempt at a story - The game has individual parts that when put together could have told a really good story had they been fleshed out a little more. Unfortunately, many important points are never even hinted at let alone outrightly explained, and these aren’t little points either. For example, why the fuck are there dinosaurs on a seemingly random, alien planet? You’d expect that would be something they’d eventually get around to explaining, you know?
● Weaponry - NOT awesome. Traditionally in the Turok franchise, the player joyfully gets to carry around a whole bunch of crazy, awesome and original weapons. The new Turok game has none of those. The player can choose between the following: Pistol, SMG, Shotgun, Bow, Energy Grenade Launcher, Mini-gun, Sniper Rifle, and an RPG. That’s it. What happened to the Quad Launcher, the Shockwave Cannon, the Chronoscepter, and the godly Fusion Cannon? The available weapons have alternate fire modes and just about all of them can be fired akimbo style, but that doesn’t make up for the lack of originality or craziness.
● Worth full price - Absolutely not. The game is short, tries to tell what could be a good story badly, and has generally mundane and uninteresting gameplay. Once you’ve spent a couple hours stabbing raptors in the head there’s not gameplay left to discover. However if you happen to find the game on the cheap, it’s worth at least one playthrough, if only to see the incredible assets in action. There are several sequences which feature some really top-notch character animation, and the fight against the game’s antagonist, Kane, is unique. Other than that, there’s not much here. Wait until you see it in the bargain bin to pick it up.
