Turok Impressions November 27,2007 - What’s manlier than rasslin’ a bear with your bare hands, Stephen Colbert style? If slaying dinosaurs is towards the top of your list, then look no further than the latest incarnation of Turok. After some play time with its demo, Turok fans should be in for a decent treat.

The demo is simple: run around as John Turok, use your guns or knifes to take town dinosaurs, and use the same method to take down enemy soldiers. With you, initially, is your comrade Slade and later on you’ll meet up with Reese. The demo presents you with a chunk of the first quarter of the game but isn’t a quarter’s worth of the game. If it was, the game would take you a mere two hours to complete. We won’t go into too much of the story, but it revolves around Turok and his team traveling to a planet ridden with genetically-altered dinosaurs under the control of Roland Kane, Turok’s former mentor.

You’ll have a handful of weapons at your disposal throughout the demo. Obviously, you’ll have your knife and bow and arrow. SMG’s, handguns, shotguns, and pulse rifles will also be available. Many of the weapons have alternate firing capabilities yet not all have been confirmed. For example, the shotgun can act as a flare launcher but the bow and arrow’s alternate feature has yet to be announced. Being standard shooter weapons, they handle decently, as they should. The knife is fun to use, however. Pulling the trigger close to a dinosaur will result in a short cinematic of Turok jumping on the dinosaur’s back and slitting its throat. Another example is Turok wrestling a dino down by its neck and stabbing it through the skull. These are known as Dino Finishers and are among a few advanced tactics included in the demo. You’ll also be able to use dinosaurs to your advantage. Raptors are especially susceptible to flares. So, shooting one near enemy soldiers can lure the beast towards them and hope the raptor will kill them. You can also plant a sticky bomb onto the dinosaur and use the same tactic, but instead detonating the bomb near the soldiers.

And what would the game be without an array of dinosaurs? Raptors are relatively abundant during the demo, but you’ll also see a few other types. There are two types that are harmless until provoked; those would be echidons and hadrosaurs. The former are small ones that merely get agitated and are killed easily while the latter are cow-like creatures that can stampede. The only other type you will face off against will be the dilophosaurus, a T-Rex like dinosaur. It’s pretty brutal but easy enough to take down with the right tactics.

The game’s graphics are pretty good, but more along the lines of what we expect out of standard shooters on today’s consoles. It’s going for more of a cinematic feel but it’s something they can work on in the next month or so. Its sound was also relatively average.

So after about a half hour, you’ll be done with the demo. Your only way to get to it is to lay down a pre-order at your local GameStop/EB Games, so in a way you’re committing to buy the game. Of course, you won’t necessarily need to go back and pay it off, but you should really only lay down the money if you’re interested enough. Turok fans should be pleased, but hopefully the final version offers a bit more.

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