Turok 2008: A Reboot in the Franchise

A character from the Golden Age of comics, John Turok, first appeared in the year 1954 under the wing of Western Comics. The early stages of the comic are disputed, according to Wikipedia the original illustrator was Rex Mason, who found inspiration in the space opera and pulp fiction to create the futuristic look of the comic, but the original writer has been a problem to locate as several different sources credit different writers as the original ones.

It’s hard to credit someone in the long list as there aren’t many original comics today; but there is one truth, that those original comics were the inspiration of the great games that we know today. This particular game is based on Turok's early adventures where he and his brother Andar tried to escape from a valley infested with dinosaurs. The original version of Turok and the one we know today are completely different, originally Turok was a pre-Columbian aborigine opposite to the Kiowa background that was given in the new game. But, the story and the game itself are excellent in any time frame.

After a series of successful games that started in 1997, a new generation was introduced to John Turok trough the Nintendo 64 and later in the Playstation 2 system; the favorable critiques that Turok receive from many webpages and bloggers gave the green light to produce the next sequels.

In 2008 the game was rebooted, there has been mixed reviews about the game but no low scores. Some critics express their discomfort by saying that reboot ruined the franchise. X-Play commented that the game is like an Uwe Boll movie and it’s not going to help revitalize the franchise. Other webpage’s like Game Informer said that the game is ok, a decent shooter but the multiplayer and the lack of checkpoints made the game boring. In the other hand, the voice talents were a big plus because the game have talents like Timothy Olyphant and Powers Boothe.

The story is good, is similar as the first game, a little more futuristic than the previous incarnations. Turok was a military of a detached branch of the government, who was trained by black ops, Turok and his team is stranded on a planet where his former mentor created modified genetic dinosaurs.

The story is not original as it was seen previously in the first game, but at least is a plus that developers tried to return to the basics, as some of its sequels weren’t as successful as the original game, due the surrealist themes that mixed first-person shooter with some clichés.

The Graphics are excellent, a five of five, and are really enjoyable to the view as the textures aren’t pixilated at all. You can practically feel the skin of the dinosaurs or the metal in your gun arsenal. The BMX are quite good also, as they give a realistic sound of the environments, and the best of the BMX's is that they play with your emotions a bit as you go further in the scenarios you feel tension because of the music and sound effects, like playing an horror movie.

One innovation in the gameplay is the technique called “Silent Kill” where you can approach to an enemy and kill him with a knife without alerting other enemies in the proximities. The gameplay is easy, really smooth and fluid, there has been an evolution since the early days of Turok; we can say that the fog is no more and the enemies look more realistically than before.

Overall Turok is a great game, with plenty of replay value and with the cooperative mode is a plus, as 2 or more players can play the missions. I highly recommend buying this game, not only for the holidays, but in general, as it’s really fun to play.