Turok

Demo hit PlayStation Store last night and I played through.

It’s a brutal game, even for a first person shooter. While shooting dinosaurs and people results in the usual bloodied corpses, it’s the knife work that really stands out. I think it gives the game a sort of weight that a lot of shooters don’t have because when you’re hammering R2 to keep that fucking dinosaur’s jaws from biting your head off, you understand the gravity of the situation in a way simple bullets don’t convey anymore.

I know nothing about this new Turok’s story other than he’s crashlanded on another planet filled with dinos and some other human bad guys, but his buddies aren’t exactly friendly with him in the demo, either. Whlie the space marine machismo is in full effect, there’s a pretty good bit of interplay between Turok and his “friends” with nicely done overtones of prejudice and envy/loathing/hatred that they hold toward him for some reason.

The shooty bits are gun crazy. Dual-wielding Halo-style seems to be the norm. Also, dinosaurs cool and will probably help break up the usual shoot, cover, shoot mechanics that pervade games these days. Dinos aren’t going to hide from your bullets behind a rock. They’re going to try to eat your sorry ass.

Kinda looking forward to checking out the full game now. 16-player multiplayer too.

Ugh.

I understand why it’s good for OXM to get an exclusive on a demo, but is it really good for MS in general for PSN to get a demo and for their American 360 owners to be told they can wait or go buy a $10 magazine?

Good to hear some positive response to the game, though.

I didn’t like the demo too much. The knife-work didn’t sell it any better than your average shooter either. (I am in the midst of Assassin’s Creed though, and knife-work there is superlative.)

The demo was set in some dark caverns, filled with dinosaurs. Too many dinosaurs. It almost felt like the dinos were respawning off-screen. That wasn’t what annoyed me though. When you get hit, the screen blurs red, and the more damage you take, the redder the edge of the screen becomes. At some point, the red takes up so much space on the edge of the screen, you lose a lot of visual at what you’re shooting. And the dinos come from all sides.

Anyway, I’ll wait for the reviews.

p.s. I got the 360 version.

That makes no sense.

I’m hoping the Prejudice thing comes from him being native American.

Because if he isn’t native American, i’ll be pissed.

The caverns are a bad place to start a demo, I agree. You’re in them for all of five or ten minutes though, tops.

I don’t understand why you’d expect a guy known as a dinosaur hunter would have a game with fewer dinosaurs, though.

The blood effect is fine, IMO. It’s a penalty for getting shot, bitten, etc. I also like how you get knocked on your ass by the dinos and see your feet as you fall backwards. Cool stuff. Also, use the X-button for a Metroid Prime-like quick strafe if you’re having trouble shooting things.

This is easily worth a rental based on the demo and might be good enough to buy.

Oh, he’s native american alright. There’s some other stuff shown that indicates his past in their unit has some effect on these other dudes with him.

Just that brief bit of background made Turok a hell of a lot more interesting as a character than the guys in Gears of War, and I like Cole Train!

Seems like an OK shooter that has rental written all over it, and a good PS3 port based on the demo available on PSN, but apart from the presence of dinosaurs it doesn’t seem to have a lot in common with Turok anymore, it instead seems like nothing but your average bald space marine shooter. The crazy over the top weapons, and the zest and pure arcade madness of the old Nintendo 64 games are completely gone, what we have instead is Gears of War in the jungle.

Indeed like you pointed out I appreciated the game’s brutality. Good dinosaur animations too, but I don’t like the brown look that practically all UE3 games share.

Apparently OXM gave Turok a 7, and since they are firmly in the 7-9 scale rating camp that doesn’t sound to great of endorsement.

How are the graphics?

How’s the voice acting? I’d be tempted to pick it up for the PC just for Powers Boothe and Tim Olyphant.

If they make all the combat as brutal and harrowing as Call of Duty 4’s dog maul minigame, I’ll be really impressed.

Anyone play both 360 and PS3 demos? Is the difference really this dramatic?

Who cares if there’s a big difference? The game isn’t worth playing.

Boring graphics, boring gameplay, the 30 seconds of story they give you is boring, the dialogue during gameplay is basically from gears of war, complete with slow walking radio conversations

Dinosaurs and co-op means I’ll be buying it. Hell I bought King Kong for the T-Rex.

Good-looking “boring” graphics > Okay-ish-looking “boring” graphics

This definitely isn’t a $60 game. No game that fails to get at least some 9 (or even 10) ratings is. I might get it in a year or so when it’s $20 on the shelves, but life’s too short to pay full price for mediocre games.

Just wait for the full array of reviews before passing judgement based on a demo/trailer, guys. Then you can feel free to pass until it’s bargain-binned. :)

Irony or a bold validation of the 7-9 scale?

I thought the demo was incredibly uninspired.

How a developer (or, even more, a publisher) can think they can foist a barely average run of the mill FPS with middling graphics and no innovation into the current FPS marketplace constantly amazes me. This thing cost a lot of money to make, and the only thing it has going for it is a license that has been tainted then dead for six years now.

It’s almost exactly like Area 51 redux.