Turok: Rage Wars

I originally used this review for my Amazon account.

Made as the console answer to Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena, Turok Rage Wars is a game near and dear to my heart.

If this was me telling you my personal score, it'd be a solid 5. However, I can say that Rage Wars has some glaring issues that you should know about.

The core progression in Rage Wars is done via "Trials". You pick a character from a fighting game style character select, each with their own starting weapons. Then, you work your way through their tree of missions. Missions go through a variety of game modes and maps, and gradually increase in difficulty. As you complete these missions, you'll unlock secondary firing modes for your weapons, as well as new weapons for your current character to use. Sometimes, the weapons you unlock might also be beneficial for another character. Someone who may only have one starting weapon by default had three after I did a few trials for other characters, making his trial much less daunting.

When you finish the trial, you unlock a new character. The idea is, you ultimately fill out the entire character roster by the end of this.

Once you've done that, you grab a friend and do it again with the two player trials. You pick any characters for that, and there's only the one path that occurs for any team.

If you don't want to do this more structured gameplay, you can also just select multiplayer, even if you are alone, and set up a match on any map you like (maps are locked to the gametype they are assigned unfortunately), drop in up to 3 bots (a max of 4 players per game), and go nuts.

Rather than weapon pickups, Rage Wars uses a load out system. You pick three "bullet" weapons, two "energy" weapons, and one "explosive" weapon. The pickups on the map are your ammo for these weapons. You only start with ammo the bullet weapons. There are some special weapons that can be found on the maps, but these are far and few between. Think stuff like sentry turrets and bear traps.

The AI is stupid. It well rush objectives even if it means certain death. It will fight you even if you clearly have the advantage. It rarely flees for supplies. Somehow, this isn't a big deal. The whole game is so absurd that it kind of works out. On occasion they do get stuck on corners, but these player models are so big on occasion that you'll laugh at it.

One of the game modes, Monkey Tag, isn't fun at all. I restart it every time I get a trial on it until it picks the Chicken for the monkey model, as it is the easiest target to see.

Quitting a trial takes you back to the trials screen, past the one you quit. It just assumes you beat it. If you go down, it realizes the mistake and won't let you go back up to the one it put you at.

Do you care about 100 percent completion? Be warned that you probably can't get it in Rage Wars. There's a bug in the coop trials that keeps it from giving you the medal from finishing one of the missions. You will never get past 99%.

This game is broken as hell. I love it to death.