Reviews
[Review] Revisiting ‘Turok Dinosaur Hunter’ on Nintendo Switch is Surprisingly Pleasant
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.
Daniel Kraus is the 2026 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction thanks to the epic highwire act of his World War I fantasy/horror novel Angel Down. This means that Kraus, an author beloved by genre fans for years, now has more eyes on his work than ever before, particularly from readers who might not typically pick up a novel that veers so heavily into hard genre spaces.
This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels.
In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11.
Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote.
Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars.
This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite.
More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.
It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus.
The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.
You must be logged in to post a comment.