Turok Retrospective Part 1: The Dinosaur Hunter
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This was the one Turok game I always remember being super popular at the local Toys"R"Us. If I didn't have my grubby little mitts on this thing's display case then somebody else sure did, that game was never left alone for long- and with box art like that it isn't hard to see why! My time actually playing Turok: Dinosaur Hunter as a young child was limited to playdates ad sleepovers, however, and perhaps more importantly I didn't spend that much time with it before its sequel, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, stole all my attention. I remembered it fondly enough, but it was always just the starting point of something greater to me- the lead up to the game that was really good. I was very wrong.
The Review
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is incredible.
I've replayed it twice recently- once in 2021 and again this past December- and to say that it "still holds up" would be an understatement. Some of the glory of course has to go to NightDive Studios for their masterful glow-up, but as long as you have a way to avoid using an N64 controller I think you can play any version of this game today and still be pleasantly surprised. Turok is an absolute blast. Both times I picked it back up I distinctly remember thinking two things:
"This is more fun than most of the modern games I've been playing recently" and "How is this not considered one of the greatest First Person Shooters of all time?"
I will sing this game's praises from the highest mountain and never stop. I'm honestly kind of blown away by how well it controls, how snappy its pacing is, how effectively it builds atmosphere and mood with such limited polygon counts. You might expect a game older than Pokémon, Harry Potter, and Saving Private Ryan to be really simple and crude- and to be fair, in some aspects it is- but Dinosaur Hunter is chock-full of thought, detail, and innovation. There's a dynamic damage system where enemies flinch and fall down differently depending on where they're shot, enemies fight with one another, levels are detailed but concise with branching alternate paths and hidden secrets to explore, and there are even a few elements of destructible environments like trees that topple over when you blast them with your bigger guns! Even before the modern glow-up this was a legitimately impressive game.
Dinosaur Hunter is a very fast paced experience though, and I mean that literally. It's not just that it's very snappy and breezy and you can beat it in one or two sittings if you want: I mean Turok himself is fast as hell! TDH is a very high-mobility game where you feel utterly unrestrained as you strafe past leaping raptors and flying bullets, leap across chasms no sane human would ever attempt, and casually jog through levels at a pace most other games reserve only for vehicle sections. It's exhilarating!
(Or problematic, if you have motion sickness...)
The gunplay involved is a lot simpler than most modern affairs, and that's a good thing: the combination of superhuman mobility and simple and aggressive aim-from-the-hip shooting makes for a very loose, lively experience, run and gun at its best. It's not about realism or even immersion: it's just really, really fun. It feels good being Turok. After a while you won't even need the levels to be as engaging and fun to replay as they are because it's just such a delight to do anything in this world. Honestly NightDive could've added an extra level that was just Turok doing his laundry and that probably still would've been rad. It's a really refreshing title to go back to. Just pure, simple joy crammed into a cartridge. This is what video games should be all about. More modern titles need to feel like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter!
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| I mean, come on. Exhibit A...? |
The Legacy
Being the first title in the Acclaim series, Dinosaur Hunter got to establish a lot of what fans later came to expect from any good Turok game. Even more than either run of the comics I'd argue it's where most of Turok's lasting identity came from. This was the beginning of all the big traditions, at least so far as the general public was concerned... but what is it that defines a Turok game, anyway?
In honor of our trigger-happy hero I'll break it all down in bullet points:
*Every game is about A Turok, not THE Turok. Turok is a title that gets passed down generationally in one family, the Fireseeds, so there are many of them. All are Dené heroes of the fictional Saquin Nation and are essentially honor-bound protectors of their land. The Turok we start with in TDH goes by Tal'Set, the Valiant One.
*Any given Turok is gonna be armed to the teeth. Think of these games like DOOM with dinosaurs or a first-person predecessor to Ratchet and Clank. It's tradition to collect an increasingly destructive and creative array of fantastical weapons throughout your adventure. Take Tal'Set, for instance: by the time he squares off with his final boss he has a futuristic Tek Bow, a fully automatic combat shotgun with explosive shells, a minigun, a grenade launcher, a quadruple rocket launcher, a rapid-fire plasma rifle, an alien anti-matter charge emitter, a fusion cannon, a particle accelerator, and a staff that rips holes in the fabric of space and time.
*Turok's adventures happen in The Lost Land, an interdimensional nexus that the Turok bloodline has been tasked with protecting. It's a world lousy with wormholes and rips in space-time so there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on: not just animals but also people from different points in time, intergalactic aliens, demons, zombies, robots, eldritch chaos gods, etc. It's a real anything goes, grab bag kinda setting, very chaotic!
*The whole "dinosaur hunter" thing is, admittedly, kiiiind of a misnomer. Dinosaurs are a part of Turok's world and absolutely will be encountered in any given game, don't get me wrong, but the driving force behind each outing is usually something totally unrelated like time travelers or a bug man from outer space. The baddie in this outing is The Campaigner, a cyborg warlord who wants to rule the universe. Also to be extra pedantic Turok doesn't usually hunt the dinosaurs he encounters so much as he just stumbles into random fights with them since they're all over the place.
The Prehistory!
I'm mostly gonna geek out about the original creatures of this series, but it would be heresy to talk about the creatures of Turok without mentioning the dinosaurs too! As mentioned previously there really aren't as many of them in this game as you might guess. In fact there's technically only three in the whole game, and of them only one is a regular recurring enemy: the raptor!
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| Raptors come in two flavors: chocolate and GUN. |
While not a dinosaur, Dimetrodon also shows up as another enemy from deep time!
The TDH Dimetrodon is a tanky watchdog type that stands guard instead of roaming around like other enemies. It doesn't usually move very much, but once it sees you it becomes totally relentless. There are two versions of it, one that's au naturel and another that has guns strapped to it, but neither one seems to be a minion of the Campaigner. They're just wild animals with no bionic implants and if they get close enough they'll actually kill the raptor and human mercenaries!
It's oddly webbing-free sail is a headscratcher I've never heard officially explained. There are some artistic reconstructions of pelycosaurs looking like this, but it was never a popular idea and they were already very old and outdated by the 1990s. Maybe the decision had more to do with animation constraints? Oddball sail aside it's actually one of the best looking prehistoric creatures in the series, in my opinion. The head is more or less the right shape, it's got the front heavy proportions and semi-sprawling gait down, and its teeth even sheath neatly behind its lips when it closes its mouth... truthfully, even with the low poly-count restrictions of the N64 I think this is a better Dimetrodon than Hollywood has ever presented. Someone on the development team must have had a soft spot for the Permian because old screenshots and magazine previews show there was once a Moschops enemy too!
Near the end of the game you're also introduced to mounted Triceratops. So far as I can tell these are not Bionosaurs, just regular dinosaurs being used as beasts of burden. They're basically just mobile weapons platforms, slowly plodding along while their riders and mounted weapons do all the fighting. They've got a rearing stomp attack to squash you with if you get too close but surprisingly enough don't charge at you or use their horns as weapons. Huh.
The only other true dino you fight in TDH is sadly a one time encounter, but oh what an encounter it is.
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The Monsters!
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The uniqueness of its entrance and color scheme earn it a lot of points with me (for the longest time I thought it might be mechanical), as does one really subtle and easy to miss detail that eluded me for years: it blends in because it's darkly colored and swept backards, but there's a tall, two-pronged crest on the top of its head similar to what you see in some real mantis genera like Pseudovates and Zoolea! Somebody really did their homework on this one, that's rad, Acclaim!
I mentioned in passing that the Lost Land had aliens, and here they are. Rather than going with the usual Grey aliens Acclaim gave us these pretty delightful lanky, four-armed bug men. They dual wield rapid-fire energy weapons and sometimes come equipped with a jetpack that lets them leap so far and fast that it might as well be a teleporter. They've got kind of a Predator vibe going with the mask and high tech weaponry, which I assume is probably the origin of all the really advanced stuff in this setting. We never get to hear why these guys are working with the Campaigner or what their motivations even are, but it's probably safe to assume they're up to no good, especially since we fight them again in the sequel. They're referred to only as "alien infantry" in this title but are later named as Mantid Drones in Turok 2. They are not to be confused with the preying mantis guardian above, which I assume is not an alien.
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The Sludge Beasts are your bog standard scifi swamp monsters. Perhaps it isn't fair to call something with no real world analogue "generic", but that's mostly how these read to me; I feel like I've seen some variation of these slimy green thingamajigs with stalk eyes and crab claws at least a hundred other times. If you're feeling really charitable I suppose you could call them "a cross between a snail and a crab", but I'd argue that makes them sound a lot more charming than they are. The Sludge Beasts don't have much in the way of personality nor are they animated very convincingly... they kind of just slide around with their arms up in that awkward position, snapping their pincers at nothing, mouths dumbly agape, looking like polygonal versions of some forgotten 50s B-movie monster. Maybe that's the look they were going for and I'm just being a hater, I dunno, but I feel like these things are weak links in TDH's otherwise strong bestiary.
Maybe I'd have a higher opinion of them if their hidden bottom half turned out to be something really cool like a centipede body with flippers or a big nautilus shell, but even if I could find out I'd still rather not. The mystery is the most interesting thing about them!
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Lost Lands' Subterraneans might just be some of my favorite video-game creatures ever. I'll admit right off the bat that I am biased- as a lifelong Tremors fan I am a sucker for a good worm monster- but these are some of the most memorable I've seen. They're less like traditional annelid worms and more like giant mealworms or maybe even crustaceans, with hard rigid plates all over their body. They're unorthodox, hard to identify creatures with a mishmash of strange traits that somehow still communicates "giant worm enemy" very effectively!
The most obvious of their weird features are their arms, because what the heck kind of worms have arms? They're pretty dang beefy ones too, also fully armored and nearly as long as the whole half of the worm that's up above ground. I'm not sure if they're meant to be insectoid, like the pedipalps of a vinegaroon, or more tubular like their bodies (such things can get a little hazy with the polygon restrictions of old games) but the three triangular claws at their ends open and close to alternate between stabbing spikes and grasping hands. Behind them are three far smaller sets of limbs that are unarmored and vestigial (or at least too small to walk with), and an array of even smaller jointless protuberances covers the back, though I think those are some kind of sensory antennae. It's not a limb arrangement that matches any real world invertebrate I know.
The Subterraneans' mouths are a bit odd too, looking an awful lot like their hands but with one added segment, totally toothless and comprised of four armor-plated jaws that snap together neatly like a beak. They're not even close to looking like earthworm, inchworm, caterpillar, or leech mouths. If anything they remind me of the pincer-like chelicerae of scorpions; between that, their eight legs, and the big grasping "arms" I can't help but wonder if these "worms" are some kind of highly derived arachnids!
One fun detail I didn't even notice until after my last playthrough is that those snappy mouthparts of theirs telescope out when they attack you! There's a whole 'nother five plates hidden behind the chompers that can accordion in and out, giving the Subteranneans a sort of retractable "neck".
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The Leapers are another favorite of mine. Like the Dimetrodon, I spent a lot of time in my childhood trying in vain to locate these things (in the wrong place) and came to the conclusion that they were rare; in reality they're one of the most common enemies in the whole game, even coming in multiple sizes and colors. Just goes to show how much of these games I really played as a kid, I must not have explored even the first two levels fully!
Anyway, Leapers seem to be original creations of Acclaim's: they're not based on any one particular archetype and so far as I'm aware never appeared in the comics. They're commonly interpretted as some sort of dinosaur by other fans, though personally I think of them more as murderous salamanders. They have extremely wide heads with disproportionately large eyes and mouths, live only in dark wet places, had segmented tails before the NightDive remaster, and have smooth, shiny skin quite unlike the dinosaurs and dinosoids that Turok usually fights. Oh, what's a dinosoid? Uh, we'll get to that later...
Leapers are jumpy, fast moving little things that can climb on walls and dive after you when you go underwater. They're hard to hit and harder to get away from and usually pop up in swarms, overwhelming you with their rapid side-to-side movements and attacking from multiple angles at once. Most of them are no bigger than the average dog, though there are two rarer varieties that're significantly larger, being bigger than both the human enemies and the raptors.
Curiously, all of them bleed two different colors. Initially you'll see yellowish green slime spurt from them when you shoot, but keep at it and red blood will splatter too. I'm not sure if it's a glitch or a feature but personally my headcanon is that those hump backs of theirs have toad-eque poison glands that we're rupturing.
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Last but certainly not least are my beloved Pur-Lin! Creatures of very uncertain affinities, they appear in all four of the Acclaim games but vary wildly in appearance, intellect, and origin. The spelling of their name is constantly changing, going from Per-Lin in early promotional material, to Pur-Linn in Valiant concept art and a magazine interview*, to Pur-Lin in TDH and the comics, to Purr-Linn in Turok 2, to Mummite(?!) in Turok 3, to Purrlin in Evolution. Got all that? The name comes from Valiant Comics Art Director Don Perlin, who designed them.
*That same interview claims that Pur-Linn was just the name of one specific individual and the whole race are called Warclubs. Is this confusing enough yet?
The short version is that they're big dumb brutes, essentially your stereotypical musclebound apes who envy human civilization and want to replicate it for themselves. According to the instruction manual they've lived in the Lost Land "for generations" but are extraterrestrial in origin. Turok 2 later retcons this detail but Turok 3 and Evolution reimagine them completely, so there's no majority consensus... maybe they're aliens, maybe they're not. The only thing that stays consistent between the first two games is that they've been in the Lost Land for at least as long as human beings, but despite their best efforts have failed to produce anything as sophisticated as our technology and are very butthurt about it.
In Turok: Dinosaur Hunter the Pur-Lin have wide, flat heads with beady yellow eyes and enormous mouths. Their sparse, giant teeth give them a hippo-like gape that's one half menacing and one half muppety. Silly-slash-frightening is my preferred way to describe them in general since they have that whole clumsy bumbling idiot thing going on but are also really formidable, tower over everything but a couple of the game's bosses, and are a hell of a lot faster than you probably think.
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| "Heard you were talkin shit, Turok!" |
This iteration is far and away my favorite of the series, and like the Leapers I think of them as being a bit amphibian. Of course they might not be literal amphibians, if the instruction manual is to be believed and they're aliens, but that's the general vibe I get. They're like frogorillas. Big, dumb ogre-hippo-frogorillas! I love them.
As you might guess they are exclusively hand-to-hand combatants by nature, bashing the ground with their fists to make shockwaves and wolloping you with punches and backhands so strong they send you soaring through the air. In fact they're the only enemy in the game that push you back when they hit you, and that effect is so dramatic they can launch you over multiple jumping platforms and off cliffs. There is a ranged variant that shoots energy blasts at you with a high-tech gauntlet, but that's gotta be a gift from the Campaigner. These guys are jealous of bows and shoot each other dead if you run between them, I really don't think they know how to make wrist-mounted plasmacasters.
And that concludes my nerdy ranting about Turok: Dinosaur Hunter! All in all a superbly entertaining run-and-gun gem from the old glory days of the N64 and a very pleasant surprise for someone who so foolishly skimmed over it for 20+ years!
Gosh, if the one I thought was "just kind of there" is THIS much fun, how amazing must Turok 2 be?!
You know, for whatever reason, I always conflated the *Turok* series with *Jurassic: The Hunted*, and I'm not sure why
ReplyDeleteHmm! I've barely played Jurassic: The Hunted (maybe I should change that?), but perhaps it's the setting? IIRC it also had some portal hijinks where bits of different settings and time periods got mixed together.
DeleteIt's possible, also likely I was just conflating them from seeing trailers for the last Turok on tv and lets plays of Jurassic: The Hunted at sort of the same time.
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