Impressions: Turok Demo

Turok is dead. Or should I say was dead. The ill-fated Turok: Evolution, which was a near launch title with the original Xbox was one of the worst FPS I’d ever played. It was bland, uninteresting and horrible to look at and so many thought the franchise was finished with. Then came along Propaganda Games and Turok 360, a game that has moved away from its native American dinosaur hunter heritage and into the boots of a well armed soldier with a score to settle.

The demo for Turok is single player only and has a good 45 minutes to an hour of gameplay from the campaign, I’m not sure where about in the campaign but I’d hazard a guess to say its close to the beginning of the game. You play as Turok and the demo starts with you and your buddy trapped in an underground cavern system and having to find their way out. The UTIII engine looks fantastic here, reflections off the rocks, moody lighting and smooth character models. As you progress through the caves you come into contact with your first enemies; Velociraptors. A feature of the game is that dinosuars are attracted to light, so firing flares will draw them towards it, giving you an opportunity to kill them while their pre-occupied. You can kill them in different ways. Knife kills are 1-hit kills but you need to be quite close to utilize it and there is a very nice animation/cut-scene for when you do knife something, though that could get repetitive depending on the amount of animations (think Assassin’s Creed counter kills). You can also duel-weild any weapon in the demo apart from your bow and arrow and grenades, but the other weapons in the demo consist of  shotguns and SMGs so this feature may not extend to all weapons in the final release. One thing I recommend as soon as you start playing is to turn the thumbstick sensitivity right up because the default setting is far too slow to keep up with sections where you have three or more dinosaurs rushing at you.

After moving through the caverns you emerge into a jungle filled with dinosaurs and mercenaries. Graphically this looks nice but could look a lot better. The trees and foliage looks a little fake and doesn’t move in the wind (hopefully it will be fixed in the final version) but the grass does and it moves as you move through it. You’ll meet back up with your squad mate after being separated in the caves and encounter your first boss battle which is a giant dilophasaurus as well as a few raptors. This is where things become quite cool, the dinosaurs of different species are not on the same team, they’ll attack you as well as the dilophasaurus as real animals would, it adds another level of strategy to the game.

Moving on to the final part of the demo after dealing with the dilophasaurus you’ll have to infiltrate an enemy encampment and make your way to the top of a hill to investigate a crash sight. Introduced here is the main purpose of the knife; stealth kills. Crouching your way through the long grass looks amazing, you can hide in the grass and as I said before it moves and you move through it. Sneaking up on a merc and sliting his through is a gift that keeps on giving and in my various play thorough’s of the demo never gets old, it is a hell of a lot of fun. After the stealth section in descends into a full of shootout with the enemies on the top of the hill and then the demo ends.

On the whole Turok is looking like a lot of fun, we don’t get too much of a glimpse into the story of the game in the demo, though it is hinted that there may be a sub plot relating too Turok’s character tied into the game played out through flashback cut-scenes. The graphics are nice but could use some fine tuning (apart from the character models, which are fantastic) and the sound effects are about what you’d expect from a FPS, though the dinosaurs sound great. With EB Games pre-order deal (get $20 off with a pre-order) the game is excellent value, certainly worth a purchase going off of the demo.