Yeah it looks great, but how does it play? Like crap! Oh and its not much fun ether!
Well now that the game is here and I finally forced myself to finish the game last night, after what good things can I say? The Dinosaurs were very well done, probably the best in any game to date. Fighting Dinosaurs is always a big hit and has some fun moments. It is a very pretty game and it looks great? It has a fantastic cast of voice actors, including Ron Pearlman, Donnie Walberg, Timothy Olyphant, and lesser known actor Chris Judge (from the TV show Stargate).
Now on to all the bad! Hmmmm….where to start?
They warn you that enemies will try to flank your position. What they mean is that dinosaurs will frequently be spawned from locations behind you or have the dinosaurs run past you so fast you have almost no time to react.
Also, enemies gain all the benefits of cover from under brush and grass but you don't. They can see you clear as day from 100 yards away through thick brush and they are more accurate with pistols that you are with a sniper rifle.
You are encouraged to lure dinosaurs to kill your enemies. They way you do this is by using a single weapon, the shot gun with its special attack mode which is a "Flare". But using a silent attack such as your bow to hit the enemy will attract both enemy and nearby dinosaurs to your position as if you were running through the jungle with police siren and flashing lights attached to your head.
You travel to this planet is space ships, you fight with Plasma Rifles, Mini-Guns, Flame Throwers, and Rocket Launchers, but in this ultra high tech future, the Knife is the most deadly weapon. How can this be you ask? Well when you have the knife equipped, you move faster and when you get in striking range of an enemy a HUGE icon appears over your view. If you pull the right trigger at that moment the camera pulls out to a third person view to show you killing the target in a "Canned" animation. Very cool for the first few times you do this, but then it gets very repetitious.
This brings me to the disorienting use of 3rd person views. The camera pops out of the character showing him performing some action in a pre-canned in game cinematic. This happens when ever you use an object, open a door, climb a ladder, or perform a kill move using the all powerful knife. Inevitably the character turns or moves when he is all done performing the canned animation from the 3rd person view and then when the camera snaps back to the character, you are not facing the direction you started the action in, frequently leading to walking off ledges or back in the direction you were already facing.
Another very disorienting experience is being hit by an explosion. Know I know what you are going to say, "Being blown up should be disorienting"! And you are right, in reality this is very true, and playing games like Battle Field has simulated this very well without making me pissed at the game. Here is what happens in Turok. You get hit by an explosion you "always" fly away from the blast area "facing" the blast! So as an example: If the blast hit behind you and you don't realize this, and you just keep holding the control stick down, you end up running back the way you were running from, all the while, the enemy is shooting you in the back. Yeah…real fun!
The use of Grenades was frustrating. You would expect grenades to be versatile and useful weapons in the hands of a skilled and well trained warrior like Turok, but in reality they are inaccurate and short ranged with a very small blast radius.
Boss battles are stupidly hard. And I am not talking about overly complicated actions that need to be taken to defeat a boss, I am talking about very small margins of error that get you killed, wait a fraction of a second to long and you get eaten and have to do it all over again! I think the creators were relying on the players going online to figure out how to win. So if you find yourself unable to beat a boss after a few tries, save yourself a headache and just go look.
Now lets talk about the repetition of events! Repetition of canned animations! Repetition of Standing on a ledge, knowing that this is the only way to go and the second you jump down the game is going to save and you are going to have a very difficult battle on your hands. The repetition of being paired off with one of your fellow marines only to see him die in a canned cinematic, and then have your other fellow marines blame you for the characters death.
In the end you are left with a great looking game, some good dinosaur battles, frustrating difficulty, that all boils down to a mediocre shooter with a poor overall experience.
I was going to give this game a 4 or a 5, but after writing nearly 2 pages of nothing but bad stuff, I think my score will be a bit lower.
Final Score: 3.5