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| Turok Dinosaur Hunter Game Free Download |
Here’s a thing – I’ve never played a Turok
game before. Despite living in a late 90s university hovel with the requisite
N64, for some reason it was a cartridge I never put in. And I haven’t caught up
since. So seeing Night Dive’s remastering of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter [official site] was out,
it made sense to fill that rather large gap in my knowledge. Gosh, Turok’s
rather good, isn’t it?
Going
back to old FPSs is completely unpredictable. Games I am sure will stand the
tests of time will feel clumsy and frustrating, while others I imagine will
have dated beyond repair still feel fresh and punchy. Turok, with some
significant help from Night Dive, is definitely in the latter category. Despite
looking an awful lot like the original, it plays absolutely beautifully on a
modern PC, with abundant modern settings to tweak the classic look, widescreen
support, and perhaps most importantly, a clean, super-slick delivery of the
game without any needless bells and whistles.
So, I genuinely didn’t know anything about
Turok, beyond that you shot at dinosaurs and had a cool bow. This wasn’t
inaccurate information. What I wasn’t aware of was the quite brilliant way in
which the game is laid out.
You start in a sprawling level, being attacked by angry
mans and even angrier dinos for absolutely no given reason, trying to find keys
for later levels scattered about in its many stretches. What it immediately
achieves, that FPS gaming so dreadfully struggles to do in our modern era, is
present the sense of huge choice about where to go while rather cunningly
funnelling you the right way. It feels almost overwhelmingly free, while really
being cunningly constricted – the ideal way to present a linear FPS without
ever resorting to, “YOU ARE LEAVING THE MISSION AREA” or requiring you follow
the bottoms of other mans.
Soon you reach the main hub
of the game, where gateways teleport you to later levels, each unlocked when
you’ve found all three keys for that level. But rather splendidly, all three
keys aren’t necessarily on the previous level. They’re scattered betwixt,
meaning you need to scour and scavenge, back and forth around where you’ve
currently unlocked. And that’s possible in a large part due to one of my most
missed aspects of the FPS: the map overlay. Gosh, I love those line drawings,
neon scratchy outlines with a crude arrow to show you where you are. It is so
damning of the non-open-world genre that they’re completely unnecessary now,
since even someone with as poor a sense of direction as me doesn’t need a map
to walk forward in a straight line. I love that I’m writing about an
eighteen year old game as if it just came out. I think it demonstrates just how
much a game as loose and undirected as Turok could succeed today, without
needing to be an open world extravaganza. And how nice it would be if there
could be more games where you move ridiculously fast, all the time. Serious Sam
intermittently keeps that flag flying, but it’s pretty much alone. It feels
madly unrealistic, and as a result, gloriously fun to control. I’ve nothing to
compare it to, of course, but I’m going to credit System Shock rescuers Night
Dive with a lot for having it feel so fluid on a modern machine, never
staggering or stumbling over itself. There are even FOV options. Goodness me.
What I really wasn’t expecting were the teleporting
enemies, let alone the teleporting dinosaurs, nor weird portals, future-o-guns,
and by the time you unlock level 5, Quake 3-like levels on multiple floors. I
think I thought it was just dinosaurs and shit, in the jungle. It’s, in fact,
utterly bonkers. And there are in those five levels, remarkably few dinosaurs.
I think it should more properly be called Turok: Man Hunter But Also Some
Dinosaurs Sometimes. Let’s see if Night Dive can fix that, too. I was expecting
at least more than one dinosaur type, and no, I don’t count those ridiculous
green fireball lobbing weirdos, nor the scampering yellow and red frog-monsters
to be dinosaurs. Nor was I expecting for the first boss fight to be, er, some
cars. It’s an extremely odd game. I cannot
imagine the minds of the developers as they plotted it out, and everyone was
all, “Yeah, sure, let’s go with that!” rather than, “Help, help, I’m working
with the crazies.” But I really have enjoyed darting about and shooting in such
a primitive way. This isn’t the future of gaming we need to rescue from the
past, but there’s so much of those 90s shooters that we really ought to
remember and include once again.
