By Dustin Chapas

Official Website
Title: Turok
Platform: Xbox 360 and PS3
ESRB Rating: M
Online: Yes
Developer: Touchstone and Propaganda

Overall Score







In Turok, you play as Joseph Turok who is a former black ops commando for an organization called Wolf Pack. He was brought up and personally trained by the leader of Wolf Pack, Kane. After awhile, Kane started assigning missions where they would have to kill innocent people and started committing numerous crimes and such. Turok did not like this at all and immediately left Wolf Pack. After Turok's departure, Wolf Pack continued to commit crimes until they were wanted by the government. Wolf Pack then fled to a distant planet where they had mysterious plans to do something. Meanwhile on Earth, the government sends an organization called Whiskey Company to this planet to find out what Wolf Pack is planning and to kill Kane. Before their mission, Joseph Turok joins Whiskey Company to get vengeance on Kane for many bad things Kane made him do against his will. As Whiskey Company is entering the atmosphere of this mysterious planet, they get shot by some cannon on the planet. While their ship is going down, the ship breaks in half. After the crash, Turok is on the back end of the ship and he and a guy named Slade are the only survivors. As they try to reach up with the front half of the ship they encounter hordes of vicious dinosaurs and other creatures that call this mysterious planet home.


Gameplay wise, Turok is an excellent game. Turok is pretty much your standard first person shooter, but this game has a lot that other games don't. First of all, there are thousands of dinosaurs! In Turok, you will use a variety of weapons that will help you fight your way through dinos, bugs, and Wolf Pack soldiers. There is the knife, bow and arrows, pistol, SMG, shotgun, chain gun, pulse rifle, sniper rifle, and sticky bomb gun. One really cool thing is that every weapon has a secondary option. For example, the SMG's secondary is a silencer, and the pulse rifle's secondary is a grenade launcher. One of the most awesome weapons in the game is the knife. You can use the knife on soldiers and dinosaurs. What is cool is that it is not always the same pregenerated knife kill. It will be different depending on how fast you approach them and from what angle you approach them from. For example, if you slowly approach a soldier from behind you might slit his throat, or you might do something like kick the back of his knee so he falls to the ground and then you drive the knife right into his head. Another use of the knife is on dinos. You could silently kill one, or you can dodge its attempt to maul you and then run at him from the side. Most of the guns are self explanatory. The bow and arrow is pretty cool because it is a long rang weapon that can kill silently as opposed to the sniper rifle which is very loud. Gameplay is what Turok is all about. Great range of weapons, great AI, great boss fights, everything you could possible want out of a game. One issue is the aim assist, which can be shaky at times, but that is a very small complaint. The game is very challenging even on the easiest difficult setting, and the dinosaurs are something you will not forget. One thing that isn't good is that save points are far and few between. Sometimes during gameplay, if you die you will completely restart a level. But this does make the game more of a challenge and adds to the games difficulty. So it isn't that big of a complaint.





The graphics in Turok are very good. The dinosaurs and bugs look very realistic and provide a great gameplay experience. The surrounding environment and foliage is also very good looking. Touchstone and Propaganda Games make excellent use of the Unreal 3 engine. A couple minor problems are that character models sometimes look a little shiny and there will be a small glitch every so often, but nothing really bad here. Very good graphical game. There are Xbox 360 games that look better than Turok, it's not the best looking game ever, but it is among the elite.

I am not going to lie, the replay value of Turok is horrible. First of all, there is no local multiplayer at all. Not even co-op. There is no excuse for a developer to not have at least local multiplayer included in their game. Another thing, the online is not that great at all. It has all the major aspects a shooter should have. Team deathmatch, capture the flag, etc... The one problem is they are horrible. I said that the aim assist in the single player campaign is not that good at times, but online it is horrible. You can't have your targeting reticule on an opponent for more than half a second. Where Halo and Call of Duty excelled, Turok falls way, way short. Replay value gets a 4 for at least having multiplayer even though it isn't good at all, and for the great single player campaign that you can play over and over again and still love.






Great Story
Great overall gameplay
Great Graphics



Lack of local multiplayer
Horrible online multiplayer
Checkpoints are few and far between