Turok

The Good
Fun gunplay, enhances the game in a faithful way.

The Bad
Tedious levels, lots of ambling about looking for hidden stuff.

The Bottom Line
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.