Introduction
Turok for the Playstation 3 boasts a game about “A Hostile Planet. A Viscous Enemy. A Deadly Fight for Survival.” All in all what I found out about this game is no matter how hostile the planet is or how viscous the enemy may seem to be, the deadliness of Turok’s fight for survival is just not enough to make a great game. If you are a mega-Jurassic Park fan or if you really enjoyed the sitcom “Dinosaurs” when you were a kid, Turok would possibly be the greatest game this side of the Paleolithic era, but if your not, you may find yourself putting down the controller a lot sooner then expected and popping in one of the many other first person shooters on the market.

Story
You are Joseph Turok, a pseudo-John Rambo with a really bad haircut. You are on a mission to take out a one Roland Kane, an escaped war criminal and once leader of the most savage black ops squads, Wolf Pack. Kane is on a once-barren planet that has been engineered and transformed into the prehistoric era by M-G Cooperation. As your ship is flying close to the planet, it is bombed by Kane’s troops causing it and everyone a board to plummet to the ground. As Turok escapes the wreckage, he finds himself lost in a huge jungle. With man and beast as enemies, Turok must fight through the planet’s jungles to find and kill your once-mentor Kane. Do you have what it takes? The answer to that question is “yes, if you are willing to play the game still after you bash yourself over the head with your controller”. First off, let me say the story is not horrible; it is just that it is not that good. If you plan on buying the game because you think the story is going to be epic, you will find yourself disappointed, but if you are buying for the same reason that most people are, shooting dinosaurs and killing people with a bow and arrow, then you can deal with the story line that seems a perfect for a really bad action flick starring Vin Diesel or The Rock. I hope it will be good as Doom…haha.

Game play
As Turok, you find your self fighting off crazy dinosaurs and not so cool bad guys with an arsenal of extremely Rambo inspired weaponry. It takes place in the jungles of the planet, every now and then you go underground through caves or through the bases that Kane's men have set up. The dinosaurs in this game are definitely not cute, purple, or cuddly. They especially do not love you or me; in fact they do not love anybody. You will find yourself face to face with some nasty prehistoric foes as soon as the game finishes loading. What is good about shooting dinosaurs is, well, you get to shoot freaking dinosaurs! What is bad is that with out a lot of practice, you will find yourself pouring countless amounts of ammo on the pesky critters as they zip by you only to end up snapping there neck or stabbing them. A nice little feature to the game is that all the dinosaurs are neutral, meaning they do not always want to kill our lovable Native American hero. Once you have access to flares, the bad guys are a bunch of Dr. Ian Malcolm’s running around with flares getting the dino’s attention. Just chuck one of those bad boys into a group of armed forces and the dinos will attack them instead of you. Speaking of armed forces, these guys are tough. For one, no matter how dumb they are they seem to have perfect accuracy and two; there are a bunch of them. If you find yourself getting killed off a lot, it is probably because you were trying to kill off a raptor attacking you while getting bombarded with machine gun bullets. To fight off the enemies, Turok comes equipped with some serious weaponry. You can both be stealthy and use a hunting knife or bow and arrow or you can go at the bad guys Schwarzenegger style with twin machine guns or a rocket launcher. A nice addition to the weaponry is that each weapon has secondary fire ability, meaning you can use the weapon in two different ways. Basically the game play is decent and who would ever get sick of gunning down dinosaurs, but the difficulty does fluctuate a lot and you will find yourself dying a lot.

Controls
The controls in Turok are pretty similar to every other shooter out there so if you are a regular FPS player you should fit right in. A problem I found with the controls, besides the fact that you cannot change them, was that the sensitivity of my movement was way out of whack. It is extremely difficult to dodge bullets, move around, and fire at dinosaurs at the same time with these controls. I find myself wasting a lot of ammo and time dying because my aim moves to fast and the recoil of the guns throws off my ability to shoot something standing perfectly still, let alone two raptors jumping at me. What I do like about the controls is little things like the ability to perform different types of moves with the same weapons and that you can sneak up to bad guys and knife ‘em to death fairly easy. But sadly you can not spend the entire game sneaking around and eventually you will run into the problem of not being able to shoot straight. After about the hundredth time you die because you just can not kill your extra swift predators, you may find yourself hitting the off button and doing something else, like popping in Jurassic Park 3 and laughing about how much it sucked.

Graphics & Sounds
For graphics, Turok runs on the Unreal Engine 3 and is very similar to the graphics of Unreal Tournament 3 also for the PS3. The jungle environments are flourishing and green, but the caves and bases are a bit bland. It seems one of the problems with the graphics are that your eyes grow so accustomed to beautiful scenery and great texture in the jungles and then the first time you go into a cave, you go through beauty withdrawals because of how bland everything is. But this little blandness is easily made up for with the detail that developers went into when making the dinosaurs. They look better then Steven Spielberg could have ever dreamed of. Being rated Mature there is a lot of blood and carnage on screen and the realness of it was done well. Also, detail to the look of the weaponry was very good. As far as sound, Turok makes it feel like you are actually in a jungle shooting T-Rex’s right next to our hero. The music is sufficient and voice actors include Ron Perlman, Timothy Olyphant, and Donnie Wahlberg.

Multiplayer or Replay ability
The storyline for Turok is single player but like many first person shooters there is online game play. What is nice about online play is that it gives you something to do after you beat the game. You can have public games were you go head-to-head with other gamers or private matches specifically for you and your buddies. A problem with online play is that I found myself waiting forever to enter a public match and even when I did there were only three other people playing. Online is no fun when a location can fit 16 players but you are only fighting three. I assume that Turok being a newer game, its player’s will grow, but until then get used to winning matched with only six or seven kills because it takes for ever to find somebody. For replay ability, after beating the game on normal mode you unlock the extra hard “inhuman” difficulty. The game also features accomplishments you can earn for doing certain things in the game. I personally feel that you get the feel of Turok the first time through and there is very little reason to ever pop it back in after you get to the end. In total, I feel that Turok’s online play is decent but no match to its competitor’s and the replay ability is small. I would recommend this game as a rental or a game that you borrow from your buddy once he is done playing it (which won’t be long).

Conclusion
In conclusion, no matter how many arrows you put through people or dinosaurs you blow up, eventually you will get sick of Turok and it will be added to the pile of “games I regret owning”, until then though enjoy your dinosaur escapades and “taken directly from First Blood” style killings. In all Turok receives a sub-par 60%.

Unlockable: Harder Difficulty To unlock a harder difficulty setting than is originally available in the game, you must beat the game once through on the Normal or Hard difficulty setting.

Hint: Run Faster To run faster, try unequipping your gun and equipping the knife, doing so will allow you to run significantly faster.

60%
Alec Taunton