The Turok series deserves its own Retronauts Micro episode. Almost nineteen years ago now the dinosaur hunting FPS was released for the N64 and Windows. A few sequels and a re-imagining later, it’s largely forgotten. To date, my main experience with Turok was on my first 3DFX Voodoo graphics card, but I didn’t stick with the game at the time.
Fast forward to present day and nostalgia and a chance to replay some of these old classics can be a powerful motivator. Night Dive Studios has become one of my favorite groups to watch because of their excellent work on restoring classic games like these. Turok fits the bill nicely, but I appreciate that Night Dive didn’t mess with the original Iguana/Akklaim title too much. In fact, besides simply working great modern computers, most if not all of the changes to Turok are technical and not gameplay-effecting. Included now are (eight) Steam Achievements, full key rebinding with keyboard, mouse, and gamepad support, dynamic lighting, bloom, FXAA, light shafts, improved water effects, increased draw distance, support for vertical sync, widescreen, and high resolution support.
On my rig, I played in 2560×1080 and I doubt my framerate ever dropped below 100 — it runs insanely smooth as you would expect and, honestly I’m not sure if Turok was always this fast or not, but it’s a great fit for the pacing of the game and the music is appropriately catchy, too. Turok is an interesting game on several fronts — many people remember the infamous “pea soup fog,” which is still present here, but it’s not nearly as annoying as it was in years past. Some may also remember the stout difficulty, but in reality, this is more of a myth than anything. Any reasonably skilled FPS player who has some patience to learn the game’s quirks won’t have a lot of trouble navigating through all eight realms. Of note, you can only save your game at specific points, and I was surprised that Night Dive did not add quick save/load support, but, this ultimately makes sense in how Turok originally handled continues and extra lives. You start off with three lives, but if you collect 100 of these floating and spinning triangle pieces you earn another life — once you store up nine lives, a cheat for infinite lives is unlocked that you can enable in the menu, but I found myself simply reloading my last save game if I died because I hated losing my Backpack which allows you to carry twice as much ammo.
Well, anyway, to get back to the general point of Turok’s unique (at least to me) nature, the life/death system is not quite like any FPS I have played before. This is especially true when you factor in that there are a lot of jumping sequences — some twenty or thirty jumps deep — that you have to traverse, and failure on any one hop is instant death. Fortunately, while a lot of jumps require precision, many of them are pretty ‘safe,’ and you can hop around at a pace that fits comfortably with the pace of the rest of the game, which is to say smooth and fast. Turok has no stamina meter — you can run, swim, climb, jump far and high, and carry about a dozen weapons and the whole game simply plays fast in large part because of this.
I liked how Turok used a central hub that had gateways to all eight of its main areas, and within each area you have to find keys to unlock additional levels. This is not a formula I would want in all my FPS games, but for Turok it just works. Interestingly, you can find keys to levels and play them out of order, for example I played through level three before two, and I could have played through level five before six, but I decided not to. So the keys are often “hidden in plain sight,” in that you can see them, but have to look around a bit to figure out how to get to them. You might have to go through one of those jump sequences I mentioned earlier or swim through caves, or defeat a few tougher enemies to then be able to push a floor touchplate or hop onto a teleporter. Turok has a lot of that old school design, from teleporters, secret areas (some dastardly well hidden!) to being able to carry so a ton of weapons to having to find keys and level-exits. For gamers that grew up in that timeframe like myself, it’s comfortable, hell even welcomed, territory. Interestingly, some enemies will respawn after several seconds, which isn’t really a challenge as much as it is a potential nuisance or a way to lose ammo. Ammo is something you’ll have to keep an eye on usually, as tougher encounters can drain bullets, plasma, and shotgun shells quickly. This made me switch to my single shot pistol, Tek Bow, or even my knife on many occasions to conserve.
All of these unique and some familiar elements about Turok made it a compelling game for me, although I will say for anyone on the fence about playing it that they should give it a solid hour or slightly more before deciding to give up. Yes, it’s a little obtuse in that it’s not always clear where you need to go, yes some of the jump sequences are unusual (and honestly harrowing given the inability to quick save), and of course the graphics aren’t up to modern standards — but it’s far from being a bad game, and I found that after that first thirty or sixty minutes, I was very motivated to keep hunting.
For a decidedly unique and old school shooter experience that looks and sounds perfectly fine and plays great on modern systems, I would recommend Turok by Night Dive Studios. To the summary…
