Quake in the Jungle
The first person shooter made its first big jump from Doom with Quake. Turok plays a lot like id Software’s shooters, but on an impact spectrum Turok doesn’t really compete. What Turok: Dinosaur Hunter does, is showcase what kind of fun the genre is capable of bringing. Raining hell on dinos in a loose adaptation of high-concept source material.
You are Turok, the time-traveling Native American dinosaur hunter of comic book fame. While you will surely hunt more than a fair few dinosaurs along the way, you’re actually hunting a man known as the Campaigner. You must save time itself and stop him from completing the Chronoscepter which he plans to use to destroy it.
As Turok, you float like a butterfly and your bow as well as the rest of your arsenal stings like bee. Turok is quick, agile and strong, able to climb certain cliff faces. Furthermore, the way your view tilts and shifts ever so slightly as you maneuver at higher speeds provides an authenticity to the movement that isn’t quite matched by the first person shooters before it.
There is a healthy assortment of arms for Turok to use in his quest to stop the man after the Chronoscepter and hunt the dinosaurs that appear to be in cahoots with him, including said Chronoscepter, if you’re so inclined to track down all of its pieces. There are the standard options like an assault rifle, a pistol, and the like, but also some futuristic particle and energy weapons. His signature weapon however, is the aforementioned bow, which can be outfitted with either regular wooden arrows or high-tech and explosive tek arrows. A few other weapons can also use different kinds of ammunition, providing a slightly more nuance to how you might approach encounters, provided you are carrying around enough ammo for all of your weapons.
Managing your ammunition can be a hindrance at times, but it provides a good excuse to explore and get to know the arsenal available to you. The level design sometimes compounds the ammunition issue, because it’s not always obvious where you should be going. It seems a shame to say that’s pretty par for the course in these faster paced first person shooters. Turok is impressive on the Nintendo 64, but it seems evident that its platform holds it back just enough to see a potential that wasn’t quite reached.
Even with these faults the largely, but not exclusively, jungle environments are fun to run around in and the dinosaurs that populate them are fun to hunt. There are plenty of secrets to find and a good mix of enemies to keep you on your toes. Though, it is a touch disappointing however, that the enemy variety isn’t in the dinos.
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter could do with some more dinos, and is perhaps done a disservice by the limitations of the Nintendo 64 platform, but make no mistake, beneath the gruff exterior is a more than competent shooter following the id tradition.
