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TUROK (PS3)
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Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios.
Developer: Propaganda Games. Released: February 2008. Genre: FPS. Other versions: X360; PC. Posted 10th October 2023. By Shane Battams © 2023 |
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One of gaming’s more divisive trends during the late 2000s was reboot culture, something we’re still seeing the effects of to this day. It’s a risky gambit: sometimes a restart can hail a new beginning for the likes of Tomb Raider, while other series resets fall flat on their face. Propaganda’s take on Turok would sadly fall into the latter category, a largely forgettable FPS that sheds the strengths of the previous games for the gritty reboot treatment. Sadly, it sinks thanks to a lack of personality, dull and clunky shooting, and a series of poor design decisions that turn heated battles into an exercise in frustration.
Corporal Joseph Turok is a space marine assigned to Whiskey company after going AWOL on the Wolf Pack, a former black ops group whose leader Kane traded military ops for war crimes. After tracking the criminal to an outworld planet, the ship is shot down, leaving the marines stranded on a jungle surface rife with prehistoric life and dangerous soldiers who shoot on sight. Turok must work with his comrades to execute their mission and escape, but it’s easier said than done when many of his group distrust him because of how he left Wolf Pack. Unfortunately, the paper-thin characterisation and lacklustre writing leave the story feeling hollow and cliched, with dialogue you can see coming a mile off. It doesn’t help that the lead, a supposed warrior with Native American heritage, shows a stone-faced personality that is less endearing and more uninteresting. The lone bright spot is Ron Perlman chewing up the scenery as a particularly vindictive marine opposite Turok, but sadly, it’s not enough.
Turok's shooting underwhelms, which is a problem, given how central it is to the game
Turok ticks a lot of seventh-generation shooter boxes, albeit half-heartedly. Spread across around a dozen chapters, levels are pretty spacious and sometimes allow for a stealthy approach, with enemies in an undetected state. A lot of the action, despite featuring dinosaurs, is middling and lacks a distinctive locale, gunfight or standout story moment. The only real instances of ingenuity come when both humans and dinosaurs are on the same battlefield, allowing you to set up a mauling using the shotgun’s flare. It can be fun to play the two sides against each other and watch the carnage unfold, though these moments feel too fleeting. A lot of the time, you’re shepherded down straightforward paths, blandly killing everything in sight. It feels like a retread of shooters from years past, despite its relatively early release in the generation.
It goes from generic to frustrating in a hiccup though, with some odd decisions which leave combat sometimes very difficult. The shooting feels slightly off, almost too zoomed in to offer a good view of your surroundings. While standard skirmishes can be beaten, wider battles can lead you stuck as to who is even shooting you. This isn’t helped by the screen turning dark red when you take damage and blurring like someone vomited Vaseline onto your screen, and Turok’s general fragility can see him dying in a snap. This is exacerbated by a lousy checkpointing system, often seeing you repeating twenty minutes of gameplay at a time which feels like a ghostly reminder of much older shooters that hadn’t figured out how to space gameplay out more suitably for consoles without quick saving. The frustration apex is reached with the bosses, a crummy handful of fights that feel clumsy and overly difficult. Two encounters with a giant T-Rex see you eaten if you get knocked down too much, but a lack of a sprint makes it nightmarish, and a fight with an underground sea creature isn’t much better. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
It goes from generic to frustrating in a hiccup though, with some odd decisions which leave combat sometimes very difficult. The shooting feels slightly off, almost too zoomed in to offer a good view of your surroundings. While standard skirmishes can be beaten, wider battles can lead you stuck as to who is even shooting you. This isn’t helped by the screen turning dark red when you take damage and blurring like someone vomited Vaseline onto your screen, and Turok’s general fragility can see him dying in a snap. This is exacerbated by a lousy checkpointing system, often seeing you repeating twenty minutes of gameplay at a time which feels like a ghostly reminder of much older shooters that hadn’t figured out how to space gameplay out more suitably for consoles without quick saving. The frustration apex is reached with the bosses, a crummy handful of fights that feel clumsy and overly difficult. Two encounters with a giant T-Rex see you eaten if you get knocked down too much, but a lack of a sprint makes it nightmarish, and a fight with an underground sea creature isn’t much better. It leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
LOW POINT: WEAPONS OF BORE
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A lot was made of Turok’s weaponry, and not in a good way. Missing several iconic staples of the series, including the gruesome Cerebral Bore, many were underwhelmed to see these missing. Arguably more damning is that the weapons present are hugely inconsistent in quality. Some weapons hit the spot, such as the bow, which comes with explosive arrows that turn dinosaurs into giblets (though not humans, for some reason) and the knife which allows you to execute gruesome kills both in and out of stealth. On the other hand, the weak shotgun may be one of gaming’s worst, the minigun is woefully underpowered and the pulse cannon feels more like you’re firing drops of water than deadly laser shots. An FPS is only as good as its guns, and sadly, Propaganda Games failed here on most accounts.
Turok would prove a case study on the importance of optimisation. Sadly, it’s one of many Unreal Engine PS3 titles that suffers from a myriad of technical issues. The dull colour palette and flat lighting certainly aren’t attractive and this is compounded by textures frequently popping in and severe slowdown in some spots, particularly during the opening escape from the shuttle. Characters look rough around the edges, though cut-scene animation is quite decent in comparison. Dinosaurs look the part at least, while the myriad of clone soldiers lack any kind of visual damage when shot (and for some reason emit sparks when stealth killed). It’s just not very attractive, outside of some locations that catch the light nicely.
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Sadly for Turok fans, this reboot would do little to stoke the flames for a series revival. Despite decent sales, servers for the PS3 version would shut just three years after the game’s release, rendering most of its content (including cooperative and multiplayer modes) inaccessible. A planned sequel was canned after Propaganda was forced to lay-off staff in 2009. Turok’s reboot provides a valuable lesson in how not to resurrect a series: it strips away most of what made the N64 classics tick, replacing it with half-hearted attempts to stay current with other FPSs. Next to the likes of Modern Warfare, however, it feels prehistoric. Between generic storytelling, weak weaponry, and underwhelming gameplay that swings between uninspired and frustrating, it’s no wonder this shooter faded from public consciousness. Unless you’re a dedicated dinosaur hunter, this one is best left in the Stone Age.
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VERDICT
"Turok proves a valuable case study in how not to reboot a series. Weak weaponry, generic story telling and gameplay that swings between uninspired and frustrating. Only for the dedicated dinosaur hunter." OVERALL: 5/10 |
OTHER FIRST-PERSON REBOOTS REVIEWED
Syndicate (2012, Xbox 360)
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Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017, Xbox One)
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