Turok - Hands On Preview
The cerebral bore is gone, but you won't care...
By Matt Kelly
It’s always nice when you get a surprise in your inbox. Sometimes it’s cool news like a batch of jaw dropping screen shots. This week it was the opportunity to get hands-on with the 2008 return of Turok. So of course we strapped on our dinosaur hunting boots and boogied on down to the distributors office to get some hands on time, and guess what? It rocks!
For those not up to speed, Turok is the 2008 reboot of the series that first appeared on the Nintendo 64, taking various elements that the series is famous for - such as a blend of conventional and unusual weaponry, dinosaur hunting, and lots of blood - and bringing them into a new setting with new characters. Turok, the lead character of the game, is very different from his previous incarnations, now portrayed as a hardened futuristic soldier in touch with ancient roots. While we don’t have a whole lot of detail on the overall story of the game, here’s basically what we do know: Turok is part of ‘Whiskey Company’ who have crashed landed on a planet in pursuit of Roland Kane, the commander of a series of research facilities and a large military force, all funded by the Mendel-Gruman Corporation. Separated from his company, Turok is out to reunite with them and presumably do nasty things to Roland. And that’s all we know for now!
Straight off the bat we found ourselves escaping the wreckage of our downed starship. Running through it's burning damaged corridors there was a lot of detail in it, from the flames, to the damaged equipment, to the sparks flying around. Escaping from the burning wreckage we had to stop though, as we were having a jaw dropping moment. We were standing in one of the most lush jungle environment we had ever seen. The first minute in that we pretty much spent looking down watching the thick grass be pushed apart as our fellow squad member trekked through it. The flora was abundant and in beautiful color, matched with a very lively soundscape.
One thing we really dug was just the open feeling of the outdoor environments. While the game still uses the unscalable rock faces quite a bit to control your movement, you’ll find that you tend to be drawn to the path you need to follow. So while it’s not a free roaming game, you don’t feel particularly confined either. You get a real sense of scale in the game, in that a lot of the open areas that look out over kilometers of landscape seem quite natural.
So while the environments weren't the most open ended thing we had ever seen, there was enough open area to be able the pull out some tactics against the enemies we encountered, which was good given that the AI was smart enough to attempt to out flank us on several occasions. They don’t go down easy either, as we saw a couple of instances where they were able to take several hits, fall, recover and move on. Turok looks to be a serious challenge in the outdoor situations. You’ll encounter many of Roland’s forces through out the game, and from what we saw they were able to use cover very effectively, working in groups to get closer and take you down.
All of the above goes for your squad as well, while you’ll have no direct control over their actions, they work with you very well. They’ll maneuver with you, find cover, provide support and put up a seriously tactical fight. And if you’re going for a stealth kill, moving through the grass to execute one of the fantastic knife attacks in the game (more on that later), they’ll hang back or move quietly so as to not alert the enemy.
One of the Turok franchises best known elements if of course, battling it out with dinosaurs. When you encounter them, you’ll find very fast they not just restricted to attempting to bite you. Dinos can lunge at you, knock you over, pin you the ground, trip you up with their tale and a whole number of other things. They’re also very natural creatures, both in looks, behavior, and the kinds you encounter. You’ll find many breeds which all have their own tactics, along with various ‘herbivores’ which won’t kill you on sight. Piss them off though and it’s on!
Speaking of pissing off dinos, one of Turok’s fairly unique elements is the ability to use dinos in a tactical way. You’ve got a whole lot of tools at your disposal, and a whole lot of elements to manipulate. Coming back to the herbivores, if you attack one of these out of site when enemies are around, it’ll assume that your enemies were the ones who attacked it and go to town on them. Fire a few shots of at some raptor eggs and watch them storm out of their lair and deal justice to your enemies. You’ve also got a few other things like flares which will allow you to distract or draw attention of the dinos. It’s very entertaining to sit back and watch, and it gives an additional elements to playing it quiet rather than running in guns blazing.
Knife combat is something that Turok looks to be doing very well in. I mean lets face it, any kind of hand to hand combat in a first person game tends to be a matter of bashing the button or a hitting some weird combination of buttons which is clunky. Not Turok though. When you stab an opponent with your knife the game will snaps into a 3rd person view as Turok grabs the enemy and knifes him to death. What added to the coolness factor of this was the animation was very different depending on enemy type, angle of attack and so on. And when we mauled a dino, the blood flowed hard. You won’t find any blood out of the humanoid troop characters though for reasons that remain mysterious. Some kind of robotic army of ninja soldiers?
We didn’t get much of a chance to see the selection of weapons available in the game, however we did see the mentioned knife (with it’s crazy blood letting moves), and the Turok classic bow. These two are always with you, along side that you can chose two other weapons to carry with you. We saw the standard machine gun and shot gun, both dual wieldable, but we also got to watch a couple of dinosaurs be turned into a ‘meat fountain’ (a term coined by our contact at the distributor) with the power of the sticky bomb. Attach, stand back, and watch the blood and body parts fly! We couldn’t help but have a bit of a manic laugh at the carnage.
Health bars don’t play a part in Turok, but rather take the trend of recovering from damage. If you get shot at, and take too much damage your vision will go blurry and red, unless you find cover. After a short time everything will return to normal. Take too much though and everyone's favorite dino hunter will cark it. It really makes you consider the area you’re in for tactical purposes. And on the topic of no health counter, from what we saw the HUD played into game very well, with elements only displaying when they were needed. Objectives, ammo, and directional cursor fade in and out, and you can summon them all by clicking the left analog stick.
One thing that was very cool in the presentation was the quick switching between first and third person perspectives for story telling or action purposes. There’s many games out there that try to do this but Turok manages to really keep the flow of what’s going on without being dragged into long story telling sequences. Again we didn’t get a huge insight into the overall story, but what we did see was presented really well.
Overall Turok is looking to be a real winner. The demo is currently available on Xbox Live and soon to be on the Playstation Network. When you get a chance check it out!
The worst part of the whole playtest experience? We don’t get to play the full thing till this February when it hits shelves everywhere. Turok looks to be a real winner, and a quality reboot to the series. You’ll see the full review right here on MyPS3 in February!
19/01/2008
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