It’s impressive how far slitting a dinosaur’s neck can go toward saving an otherwise mediocre game from becoming immediate bargain-bin fodder. Without the lumbering lizards, Turok’s middling artificial intelligence, spotty difficulty, and average production values would make it a merely functional first-person shooter, and the shoddiness with which it’s been ported to the PC would be a mark of shame on any developer’s record. Yet shooting and stabbing dinos is amusing enough to keep Turok from sinking into the abyss of mediocrity--but just barely.
The story bears no resemblance to the Turok games of yore. It’s the spacefaring future, and as Joseph Turok, you join a military team called Whiskey Company that is tasked with capturing your former mentor, Kane. While orbiting the planet that functions as Kane’s home base, the company’s ship is shot down, and you and your distrustful comrades must fight off all manner of prehistoric beasts while searching for Kane and developing an escape plan. The plot itself is entirely uninteresting, but Turok’s mysterious flashbacks and the tension that builds between him and Whiskey teammate Slade keep things flowing.
Unsurprisingly, you spend a big chunk of time shooting at dinosaurs, and they are indeed the stars of the extraterrestrial jungle. A few of them, such as the towering Tyrannosaurus rex, are appropriately imposing and shake the ground as they lumber toward their meaty morsels. The garden-variety reptiles are more common but provide a fair number of exciting moments due to their remarkable speed and agility. The most interesting of these dinos will scurry toward you for a quick clawing and then scamper away, possibly to flit up into a tree and survey the situation before again galloping in your direction. When shot, your scaled foes will flop around and try to get their bearings, make clumsy attempts to get back on their feet, and thrash around in a flurry of limbs and teeth. It’s entertaining to watch, and though there’s no way to know if real dinosaurs would react in similar fashion, it still seems remarkably authentic.
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