For those about Turok, there’s a game for you! Bloody Disgusting’s Turok Dinosaur Hunter review finds nostalgia aided by some modern touches.
90’s shooters rarely age well, so there was bound to be some apprehension in returning to one like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter that already lived in the shadow of others back then.
So it’s a pleasant surprise to find that Iguana Entertainment’s 22-year-old shooter holds up fairly well thanks to some helping hands from Night Dive Studios’ remaster.
While Rare stole the show on the N64 as the God of console shooters thanks to Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and its sequel made a decent, if imperfect, claim to be included among the golden era. The world was still just a bit crazy about dinosaurs in 1997, even if The Lost World: Jurassic Park did dampen that enthusiasm just a little. In video game land, the only game to really capitalize in a meaningful way was Tomb Raider with its famous T-Rex sequence and surrounding ‘Land of the Lost’ level.
Enter Acclaim’s Turok. An exploration-based shooter that saw you fighting off prehistoric beasts alongside human grunts and even demons. The titular Turok is the protagonist, a time-traveling Native American warrior tasked with protecting the delicate balance between our reality and that of the ‘Lost Land’, a place out of time that, as a result, features dinosaurs.
This Nintendo Switch version is based on the 2015 PC remaster, so it’s a spruced up, smoothed out Turok already, and its quality of life improvements certainly help buff out some of those 90’s shooter idiosyncrasies (if not all). For instance, this was an early adopter of the twin-stick method for console shooters (the thought of enduring what came before it ever again is unbearable), and while it’s close to the more fluid modern interpretation, it isn’t quite there in its default state. Yet in this version, you’re able to tweak the controls in a number of ways including movement speed and input sensitivity. This, coupled with options for depth of field, visual tweaks (including the option to turn off the in-game fog that was there to hide technical imitations of the time), and lots more, makes for a much more palatable revisit than you’d otherwise expect. It even throws in achievements and cheats to keep players of all skill levels/patience levels invested.
That’s not to say that Turok hasn’ aged. Aside from the blocky visuals, there’s not much razzmatazz to how it looks, even if it does still boast some impressive level design thanks to branching and looping paths that put many modern shooters to shame, it’s sadly quite sparse and a touch too samey. While there is some semblance of a story, it doesn’t much impact your interaction with the world, as you generally just fetch a bunch of keys and return to the central hub to go to the next place to repeat the process. It also features no memorable boss fights. Not awful, just simply ‘there’.
So Turok may have good sprawling levels, but the sparse visuals and fetch quest gameplay loop are the most obvious signs that this is a game from two decades ago.
Elsewhere, with all the improvements to Turok’s movement, he’s still an absolute pain in the arse when it comes to jumping, and given some of the hazards you’ll be attempting to jump under duress, that leaves some bitter frustration.
Shooting is a bit hit and miss, even with assistance. The game doesn’t always keep up with its own speed, and that makes the aiming erratic. As such, the default knife becomes one of the more reliable ways to get out of a jam, which is a shame because Turok has a glorious selection of ridiculous weaponry that should be a bit easier to use than they are. They are at least, still enjoyable to mess about with. Hopefully, with Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, this should be less of a problem. Oh, and the fact enemies constantly respawn means you end up wasting ammo far too much to properly enjoy the gleeful savagery of them.
It’s easy to forgive Turok‘s shortcomings though because it’s still a pretty fun shooter, and its low-fi graphics are much more palatable in portable form. It’s not exactly an essential purchase for all, but as a playable piece of nostalgia, it’s been dragged into the modern era fairly successfully for fans to enjoy without many of its original frustrations and limitations.
Turok Dinosaur Hunter review code provided by the publisher
Turok Dinosaur Hunter is out now on Nintendo Switch, and is also available on PC and Xbox One.