Turok Retrospective Part 4: Evolution

 

Having outlived its original N64 platform, the Turok series crossed over to the Xbox, GameCube, and Playstation 2 in 2002 for one final romp, Turok: Evolution. Its release marked the end of the Acclaim era and almost of Turok himself, with only a handful of other projects surfacing in the years since and none of them being as critically acclaimed or connected by lore. Evolution wasn't meant to be the end of this series, however, and a sequel titled Turok: Resurrection was pitched for a 2006 release, but never made it to development. So why, then, was it the end?

Well... Evolution basically went through the same ill-fated arc that Shadow of Oblivion did, just worse. Acclaim needed a hit to keep the Turok train rolling but expectations had risen to a new high. They needed to please fans by topping Turok 3 and make something that would have enough mainstream appeal to be financially successful, but they were also coming in after the longest gap between games yet, and at a point where video-game technology and graphics were rapidly advancing. "Good enough" wasn't going to cut it this time: they needed to push the envelope and make everyone's jaws drop. After a meaty marketing campaign and what I have to assume was a nerve-wracking development process, Turok: Evolution came out to middling reviews... and that was that for the Son of Stone.

My own personal experience was that this game was a "let down". I remember following the build-up to it and feeling excited, but the final result just wasn't what I'd hoped for. I backed out of buying it, played only the teenciest bit of it at a friend's house, and then decided I was done with it.

We know by now that my childhood impressions of things are always wrong, but how wrong was I about Turok: Evolution? Was this game actually a step down from Acclaim's N64 titles or was I just being too picky for my own good?

The Review

I think a little of both is true. I didn't give this game the fair shake it deserved back in the day, but having played it again now I'm afraid I still can't say I enjoyed my time with it. I want to love Turok: Evolution, but I don't. Before I go any further, though, I want to make two things abundantly clear: I played this game on Playstation 2 and I did not finish it.

I know, I know. Reviewing a game I didn't complete? Big faux pas. I'm aware! So I'm gonna keep this first half of the post as short as I possibly can and go really light on judgement. Actually what I think I need to do most of all is apologize to NightDive Studios! I praised them for all the visual improvements they made, but didn't say much about how they changed game feel. In my mind there hadn't been much worth talking about- I always remembered liking the way the N64 games handled and assumed they didn't change much- but going back to one of these titles in its original form was very eye-opening.

Even as the most recent of the four Acclaim Turok games, Evolution has still, in my opinion, aged poorly. Even for a game of its time it has pretty low-res looking graphics. Everything has a smeared, blurry appearance, like there's a layer of Vaseline on the screen. It's not the most appealing thing visually and more importantly it makes a lot of the text difficult to decipher (though it is substantially more legible in the other versions). I can't comment on how the game handles on Xbox/GameCube/PC but on PS2 the controls are very sluggish and unresponsive, aiming is jerky, and the framerate dropped a lot. The age of the game and the quality of this port made it really hard for me to get an objective read on how good or bad Turok: Evolution really was in its intended form, so after 15 levels of banging my head against the ol' wall of antiquity I tapped out.

These things happen. Technology improves, developers innovate, the medium evolves. Such is gaming! Not everything stands the test of time and even some of the all time greats feel rough around the edges by today's standards. Clearly, though, I underestimated NightDive! The difference between how this and any of their remasters feels is so extreme that I have to wonder if I'd be in for an unpleasant surprise if I tracked down an original console and cartridge of the first game. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes here than just cleaning up textures. Perhaps I gave the first three games too much credit and NightDive not enough...

Turok: Evolution would benefit immensely from a remaster and NightDive's the studio to do it. I hope they get an opportunity to do so, I'm sure they'd do stellar work!

The Legacy

Aesthetically speaking Evolution is closer to Dinosaur Hunter than any of the games that follow it. The main menu especially feels very TDH and features a sparse jungle environment with palm trees and stone pillars where enemies creep around through thick fog. The settings' more high-tech science fiction elements have been downplayed a smidge in favor of more jungle adventure-y The Lost World type vibes, complete with rope bridges, temples, a touch of mysticism, and a lot more prehistory.

Our guy Tal'Set even gets to come back, cuz this is a prequel title! We finally get to see where he came from originally and how he arrived in the Lost Land, and since this is a more cutscene heavy game we also get a lot more out of him as a character.

 Tal'Set is younger here, of course, and looks more like the version of himself featured in old N64 promo art than his model in TDH. I'm sad to say that playing as him won't give you half the same power trip it did back in '97, buuut to the game's credit the story and supplemental material at least build him up that way! Evolution's Tal'Set is stoic, fearless, and badass. He doesn't take shit from American generals or mystical hooded aliens but he does empathize naturally with the everyday people of his setting and seems more motivated by human compassion than anything so lofty as prophecy, the fate of his bloodline, or the structural integrity of the multiverse. It's endearing and, at this point, pretty refreshing.

Now, I already came clean about not finishing this game, so I am gonna skip over certain things like the weapons (because I didn't get to try them all) and the story (because I watched most of it on YouTube), but I will comment on the continuity, because it's... a little weird.

At times Evolution feels more like a reboot than a prequel because of how little it has to do with Turok's established lore. There's a whole cast of new characters and villains but none of them have anything to do with the over-arching story of the Turok series, the returning non-human races all have different names and backstories and designs, there are no returning weapons save for the Tek Bow, and the levels have a specific design aesthetic I call "Mad Max meets Walking With Dinosaurs" which is honestly wonderful for representing the Lost Land but also doesn't look much like anything from the other three games. As if that weren't enough to give the feeling of a new continuity Tal'Set was also apparently going to die and come back to life as a spirit summoning warlock at the start of this game's planned sequel, so, uh... good luck figuring out how that was ever gonna lead in to Dinosaur Hunter?

Aaaanyway, if we're talking about Turok: Evolution's legacy I'd be crazy not to mention...

 

The Raptor!

For whatever reason this snaggle-toothed beast became one of the most commonly referenced and copied dinosaurs of all time virtually overnight. Like the Papo T. rex or... well, pretty much anything from the Jurassic movies... it pops up time and time again, years after its initial release, often being cited by people who don't even know what it was originally from. This raptor's had too many appearances to fit into one blog post, but I decided to give it the old college try anyway, so let's take a quick trip down memory lane!

 The Monsters!

In my previous three entries I covered the dinosaurs first, but in a surprise twist Turok: Evolution actually featured way more creatures that are prehistoric than fictional! In fact there's really only two to talk about this time so I think it makes more sense to get them out of the way first, especially since they're faces we've seen before!

Recognize this guy?

Wait. Craig, buddy, is that you?!

 

...me neither, but apparently we're supposed to! This is a Purrlin!

I don't know what it was that doomed these guys to get totally rewritten every single time they appeared, but Evolution surely wasn't exempt and probably made the most changes of all. Their version of the Purrlin (spelled ever so slightly differently yet again) are still gorilla-like creatures that make shockwaves when they punch things, but other than that they're nearly unrecognizable. They've gone back to their alien origin again, but not in the "stranded creature from another world" kind of sense. These Purrlin are more like intelligent alien invaders. They still grunt and growl like monsters, sure, but they also wear clothing, wield weapons, are conscious members of this game's Big Bad Guy Alliance, and perhaps most importantly don't have a tech dealer this time. Before there was always some race of alien bugmen or warlords or interdimensional death cults to give them hand-me-down goodies, but no, not here. Everything these Purrlin use is presumably of their own invention.

They've undergone some dramatic physical changes, too, now being a bit bigger, scaleless, gray-skinned, and way more humanoid. They stand up straight like people and do the kind of sideways shuffle you usually see from actors who are pretending to be apes. There's less actual knuckle-walking going on and they just come across as completely different creatures. If the T2 Purr-Linn were Resident Evil Hunters then these Evolution Purrlin are more like Brutes from Halo. There's almost nothing connecting them to the frog-gorillas from 1 or the gorilla-frog animals from 3, and don't even ask me how these guys got so much dumber and more animalistic in the few years between Evolution and Dinosaur Hunter. Even us Americans don't devolve that fast!

 

You know who did, though? The dinosoids, apparently!

"Duuuuuuh...."

Okay okay, I know this guy looks like he operates on half a brain cell, but compared to his Turok 2 dinosoid descendants he's a freakin' genius. The evil lizardmen of this entry are fully upright, speak, have a government, and use highly advanced tech comparable to modern humans. They're still power hungry fascist goons, but at least their plan here isn't to Make the Lost Land Great Again by erasing it from reality and killing themselves. I guess the non-human races went through a pretty harsh dark age between Evolution and Dinosaur Hunter?

Anyway, this buff iguana and his many cold-blooded compadres are part of a "new" enemy faction called the Sleg who act as the main badguys of Evolution. They're not formally introduced so much as they're just presented as a normal presence in the Lost Land, so you can go through the whole game (or watch it all on YouTube... ahem) without hearing the word "dinosoid" uttered once. If they weren't so similar looking it'd be easy to assume they're just not related at all, but of course Acclaim couldn't let it be that simple so in the comics they're all referred to as dinosoids instead of Sleg, one of them is labeled as a dinosoid in the instruction manual, and several assets in the game's files call them dinosoids. They're also consistently labeled as dinosoids in all the publicly shared concept art.

Since the devs apparently couldn't decide if the dinosoids and Sleg were the same thing or not we're also not given an explanation for why their name changed. If I had to guess I would've thought they'd change it from dinosoid to Sleg and not the other way around, since "dinosoid" just sounds so clinical and generic, but maybe they're not actually fans of their more unique moniker? I mean they don't say it like they're ashamed of it, but maybe it wasn't a name they chose themselves...? A friend of mine theorized recently that Sleg might've been a racial slur for dinosoids and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since!

Just in case this too wasn't confusing enough, Evolution also redesigns the dinosoids as a race of literal lizard people and states they're all cyborgs. Yeah... sure. Why not?

Virtually all of the unique enemies featured in Evolution are Sle- I mean, dinosoids (sorry), which isn't great for enemy variety, but it does mean I at least have more than one design to talk about here. Some are big buff guys like the iguana-man above, but this more common foot soldier is a lot thinner and lankier with a triangular head that reminds me of a chameleon.

Sergeants are a bit more like agamids and remind me of some of the fence lizards that live out my way. They're a middle point between the twiggy scouts and buffer soldiers and have sort of a dad-bod. Mostly very traditional in their design, but they do buck the usual trend of not having visible teeth. I wonder if their eye-high tusks make it hard to aim?

This worker class seems to have smoother, less scale-covered skin and some pretty weird facial anatomy. The back of their head is bifurcated slightly and they have loose, hanging jowels with pink lips. Reminds me of something from oldschool Star Wars! They also have a row of some pretty damn major spikes on their back, something most classes lack; a few others also have back spikes, but theirs are all paired and splayed out more to the side.

The Commando is also more fantastical looking, being sort of a dinosaur-dragon-alien man with tusks and horns. He's obviously reptilian looking but none of his anatomy feels directly connected to any real species. They give me a more anime-ish vibe, like something you might see in a super robot show, or maybe even Monster Hunter. Their tusk mustache is pretty stylish!

The Rapier is one of the oddest and scariest looking of all the dinosoids, like a Lost Land version of a Todd McFarlane character. Very hellish, very Violator. His lipless grin and freakishly long, flat teeth make for a pretty unsettling sight that isn't like anything else in the game. I wouldn't necessarily have guessed he had anything to do with these other lizards, but apparently he does. There's a surprising amount of diversity in this army, so much so that I'm not totally convinced this is all one race.

The Raptor Handler is another good example. This is clearly not a lizard or a dinosaur, right? He's a cobra! A snake man! He doesn't even have the same number of fingers as the other guys! I'd really like to know if this trend is just haphazard character design or if there's real lore behind it, like a genetic manipulation program or an alliance of multiple reptiloids.

Lord Tyrannus, ruler of the S-word gang, is like the shadow villain of Evolution, always being built up as the setting's true threat and appearing in lots of cutscenes but almost never interacting with Turok directly. He gets away unscathed at the end of the game and basically acts like Oblivion did back in Turok 2, dangling the possibility of a future boss fight over the audience's head in hopes of getting them to play the sequel. Turok 5 of course never came to be, but handheld players at least got a chance to fight him in the Game Boy Advance port of this game. He's more dinosaurian looking than his minions but is also just so human-shaped I can't help but think he looks a bit like a dude in a Halloween mask.

There's also, um... whatever these are? I'm really not sure if they're even dinosoids! They only appear in one cutscene and aren't named or barely even acknowledged. A few of them are just casually lounging around the throne of one of the game's supporting characters. No big deal, I guess? They mostly act like animals, snarling and pacing back and forth on all fours, but interestingly they're referred to as "friends" rather than pets, can stand upright, and even talk!

"It's okay man, I don't know what we are either."

I'm really at a loss as to why these creatures look and act so different from the other dinosoids or what else they actually might be (a redesign of the Raptoids from Turok 2? Random chupacabras?), but they're easily my favorite monster design of the game. Their red, black, and yellow color scheme is very eye catching, they're animated well, and they've got a pretty menacing air about them... it's probably a good thing we never had to fight them!

 

The Prehistory!

Despite what the front of the box might have you believing, Turok: Evolution's obligatory raptor enemy is not especially over the top. No canine teeth or blood-soaked claws here. It's not even green!

 All the Turok games thus far have had really nebulous pop-culture "raptors" based more on Jurassic Park than anything in reality, but Evolution's iteration is the most obvious pastiche of them all, with wrinkly gray-brown skin, yellow eyes with vertical cat-like pupils, and a penchant for running around in groups. It's almost literally the OG Jurassic Park raptor, just with some watered down colors and textures. The only difference even worth noting is that its teeth- far from being the gore-flecked fangs advertised on the box- are actually way smaller than those of the Jurassic Park raptor!

Evolution's raptor does come in a few different colors, but while we're on the subject of Jurassic Park...

This one looks a little familiar, no? I can't say for sure if it was based on the Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World "cyclops raptor" toy or not, but it was definitely the first thing that came to my mind!

Probably the most interesting thing about this incarnation of the raptor is that it was almost two separate enemies: Velociraptor and Utahraptor! Design-wise the differences were unfortunately pretty negligible- it doesn't look like the art team actually referenced either dinosaur- but apparently their Velociraptor was originally going to be a small little thing. For anyone not in the know that's actually much truer to life, so seeing that demonstrated in a mainstream game sure would've been nice!

 

 

Of course we are all living in a Jurassic World these days, so ultimately pop culture won out and the small dino role went to Compsognathus instead. This JP staple's been in most of the games thus far so no big surprise, plus it looks like a little raptor at first glance anyway, so... eh?

This one's kind of a middling design in my opinion. I like its natural looking cryptic patterning and the splash of color on its underside, and I definitely appreciate that it's less of a direct JP copy-paste than it usually is in these games, but it also doesn't look very much like a Compsognathus. If we didn't already know what the other cut raptor looked like I would've guessed this was a repurposed Velociraptor.

For the less dino-obsessed out there, the real animal had a noticeably smaller head, shorter neck, and much shorter arms. It probably had a covering of fur-like feathers too, but hey it was 2002, I think we can cut them some slack on that. Technically the legs are off too since they're lengthened in the wrong parts here- the femur (thigh) and metatarsals (foot) instead of the tibia & fibula (lower leg)- but at least there was an effort to make the legs long, plus that's the kind of detail only someone like me would even care about, so I'll cut them even more slack! The end result is still mid but at least an effort was made.

 

No prehistoric bestiary would be complete without a Tyrannosaurus rex, and I'm pleased to say Evolution offers what is objectively the most realistic looking one the Turok games have ever featured! It's still out of date (again, this was from 2002!), but for the time I think it's a respectable effort. The main thing "wrong" with it is its build, which looks quite lean compared to what paleontologists know now... T. rex actually tends to get undermuscled in most mass media, believe it or not, and is well known for its exceptionally wide, heavy, and robust body plan. Luckily this is actually a REALLY easy thing to handwave away, even for the nerds like me, because fossils of T. rex at varying ages have also shown us that these dinosaurs started out life long legged and thin and only transitioned into musclebound behemoths later in life. The rex in Evolution could just be a younger animal, maybe fresh out of its teenage years and still trying to pack on weight!

...Of course that theory goes straight out the window when you remember that the larger T. rex you fight as a boss has exactly the same proportions, but hey, I tried!

 

 

Alas, T. rex's iconic rival and fellow A-lister Triceratops did not fare nearly so well.

I'm sure to the untrained eye this model looks "fine", but if you're even a little bit familiar with the anatomy of this dino or its relatives you'll recognize right away that this is actually a pretty terrible likeness. Just about every part of this creature's body is wildly off-model. Let me explain!

Just like its tyrant lizard nemesis, Triceratops was an absolute unit of an animal. It had an exceptionally sturdy and compact body that was wider and taller at the back, was short legged, and had a very big, very heavy head. Think of it like a beaked rhinoceros with extra horns... only this rhinoceros was as tall as an African elephant and weighed twice as much. It wasn't the kind of animal to be galloping around like a playful puppy or standing on long, tall legs. The proportions and structure of the body and legs are just nowhere close to being right here. The toes aren't very Triceratops-like either, but that's a detail nobody in Hollywood or Silicon Valley ever gets right, and I'll admit it is very nitpicky, so, moving on!

The head isn't really right either, sorry to say. There are a LOT of little things going wrong there that I'll just brush over- the undersized beak and oversized nose horn, the missing jugals (cheek horns), the weird goat-eyes and chin spike, the nostrils are probably the wrong size and in the wrong place- but we at least gotta talk about that frill. That frill is all kinds of wrong. I don't even think it's a Triceratops frill!

Here's a photo for comparison. Right away I'm sure you'll see two things that're different, the shape and the edges. Triceratops had a much shorter, wider, and more circular frill than what we see in Evolution, less like a tower shield and more like an aspis or even an extra-big buckler shield. It also wasn't smooth. There should be a bunch of little bone nublets called epoccipitals rimming the frill. The shape, size, and number of these bones varied between species and also changed over time (they usually started out separate and then fused into the frill as the animal grew), but almost all of the horn-faced dinosaurs had them and Triceratops' would've given it an especially hard to miss saw-toothed look.

I don't know for sure but I suspect that the frill on Evolution's Trike looks the way it does because it was based on the wrong dinosaur.

Pictured above is Torosaurus, a related dinosaur that gained a lot of notoriety about a decade ago due to a series of scientific papers published by John Scannella and Jack Horner. I won't bore you with all the details (this is a Turok review, I haven't forgotten!), but long story short some experts argued that Torosaurus and Triceratops might've been the same animal, with Toro being the adult and Trikey being a younger form. Most paleontologists no longer believe this for a number of very compelling and probably boring reasons that I know you're not interested in, but the idea got a TON of attention at the time and seems relevant here... the funniest thing about this, though, is that it's not! The first paper to seriously push this idea didn't come out out until seven years after Turok: Evolution's release, meaning this mix-up was purely coincidental!

So how and why did the devs get Triceratops mixed up with some C-list relative that most people have never even heard of? My guess: somebody saw the (hugely popular and influential) documentary Walking with Dinosaurs in 1999 and used their Torosaurus as a reference.

One last thing before I move on to the next creature! Whoever decided on this creature's final colors just fucked up, full stop. I'm sorry but look at these unused alternate skins!

This is just objectively better in every way, is it not? The patterns are more obvious and interesting looking, it's more original (gray-brown became the standard for Triceratops after Jurassic Park), and it's more intimidating to boot. I'm really not seeing the downsides here, why was this not used?!

And then you have this one with an EVIL GOTH SKULL FACE for a frill! That's so sick! False eyespots like that are actually a REALLY popular (and probably even likely) trend in modern paleoart so this would've been both cool looking and way ahead of its time. What a missed opportunity!

 

 

While on the subject of ceratopsids, our old friend Styracosaurus from Turok 2 is back too! He's a mount for the enemy this time, not for us, and serves as a midgame arena boss. I think he looks leagues better than the Triceratops, with a more interesting, stripey, multi-hued pattern and more accurate anatomy. No missing jugals or epoccipitals here! Even that funny forward curving horn isn't wrong: Styracosaurus is one of the best known examples of a dinosaur with features that varied between individuals! Paleontologists have uncovered quite a few Styrac skulls, actually, and they show us that not all of them had exactly the same horn shape. Some were straight, some curved back, and some curved forward- just like this!

In all fairness, though, the body on Evolution's Styrac is just as inaccurate as the Triceratops'. Even for a "smaller" ceratopsid (weighing 3 tons and coming up just short of 20 feet long) those legs are waaaay too thin and long!

Pretty early in the game we get to meet Brachiosaurus, another dinosaur made famous by JP. It's mostly just another direct imitation, so there's not much to talk about- or is there?

Buckle up or skip ahead, I'm goin' on a tangent, baby!

Prior to 1993 the most famous sauropod (giant, long-necked dinosaur) was easily Brontosaurus, but Jurassic Park almost singlehandedly* erased it from the popular consciousness. The number of people who saw that film and thought its dinosaurs looked amazing was just so enormous that it basically "re-educated" the entire general public on dinosaurs. "That one with the long neck" was suddenly Brachiosaurus now, not Brontosaurus. The overwhelming majority of mass media switched over to depicting it instead of Brontosaurus (sometimes even confusing the two!) and based the look of their long-necked dinos off the "big cows" from Jurassic Park.

*138 years of "Brontosaurus wasn't a real dinosaur!!!" didn't exactly help, but that's another story!

Funny thing, though. Turok: Evolution doesn't actually feature a Brachiosaurus... and neither does Jurassic Park, or anything else you've probably watched, read, or played in the last 30 years. You might not have even seen a Brachiosaurus before!

Don't believe me? Let's test it! Which one of these is a Brachiosaurus skull?

 

I'll list the answers down below*, but if you don't get it right, don't fret! It's not your fault!

Here's why:

Brachiosaurus is one of the biggest victims of identity theft in paleontology (literally). For as iconic as it is it's not actually known from very complete remains, so there's been a bit of confusion over the years as to what exactly it looked like and how widespread it was. Many isolated neck and leg bones had been collected that looked similar and dated to the same time period, but without complete skeletons it was impossible to know if they were all really the same thing or not. The bones baring the strongest resemblances were concentrated in the western United States and Tanzania, and since Africa and North America had only recently split apart during the Jurassic, it made sense to theorize that the shifting continents might have split the Brachiosaurus genus into two geographically isolated species. Tentatively these become known as B. altithorax (the American Brachiosaurus) and B. brancai (the African Brachiosaurus).

Now, with the important acknowledgement that this was only a working theory this idea served well enough for a time, but there was still a hitch: if the general public was going to know about Brachiosaurus too then they would need to be able to see it. So... how do you illustrate a dinosaur when you're not even sure what it looks like? How do you build a museum mount when you only have a handful of bones?

Well... you do the best that you can. And at that time, the best anyone could do was take the bones known from one species and fill in as many of the missing pieces from the other as they could. So institutions like the Natural History Museum of Berlin eventually started to put up replica skeletons that combined elements of altithorax and brancai as a visual best guess as to what Brachiosaurus might've looked like. These restorations would go on to be seen by millions of people all over the world- including some of the ones that worked on the film adaptation of Jurassic Park.

Fortunately for our understanding of the prehistoric world, more remains of both species were later discovered! And they cleared up a lot about what we didn't know, like... that "B. brancai" wasn't actually a Brachiosaurus at all. Oops.

The skull on the left- the one with that tall, sloping head bump and blocky upturned snoot you're probably used to- came from "B. brancai", AKA, not Brachiosaurus. That animal would eventually be renamed as Giraffatitan and recognized as its own totally separate and unique dinosaur. The longer, more triangular skull on the right is a far recenter find and actually belongs to Brachiosaurus. It also resembles the skulls of some different sauropods (the Titanosaurs) that lived tens of millions of years after Brachiosaurus, so that's interesting!

There were differences in their bodies, too, by the by. The really vertical, compact, front-heavy build seen on the JP "Brachio" and all its mass media descendants is also a Giraffatitan thing. Brachiosaurus is similar, but the proportions aren't quite so extreme and it has a longer waist and tail... and that's not even taking into account all the possible differences that we can't verify, like their colors and patterns, the sounds they made, their behaviors, and any soft parts of the body that might not've fossilized!

*Answers:

A.) Abydosaurus, B.) Sarmientosaurus, C.) Nemegtosaurus, D.) Giraffatitan

E.) Brachiosaurus, F.) Europasaurus, G.) Camarasaurus, H.) Mamenchisaurus

BONUS FUN FACT: The first game in this series, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, originally had this dinosaur too, but it got cut from the final release because it was too big to fit on the N64 cartridge. It just recently got de-extincted by the madlads over at NightDive Studios and can now be seen fully restored in their remastered version of the game! And yes, it's really a Giraffatitan too!

Evolution also introduces a second sauropod, though it's unclear what kind it's supposed to be. It's just called the Juggernaut and serves mostly as a set piece. Very impressive looking, but your longest interaction with it is running around inside the base on its back. You only get to see the beast itself two times outside of loading screens: once for a few seconds as you approach the base on it and then as a corpse decorating the following level. I get the impression it was really just made to wow audiences and wasn't something anybody spent much time thinking about, so I won't waste much breath speculating on what it could be or how accurate it is.

My kneejerk reaction is that the Juggernaut looks like a Diplodocus, but given the size of it I think a titanosaur might be "more" likely. I say more in quotation marks because this thing's in-game size is absolutely insane, way bigger than any real dinosaur that ever lived and more akin to a kaiju. Its head alone is bigger than a Quetzalcoatlus... for reference, here's a picture of me standing next to one of those:

Oh. That's big.

So, since I used a Quetzalcoatlus as a unit of measurement that must mean there's one in Turok: Evolution, right? Well... uhhhh... yes and no?

There is a very large pterosaur in the game that's roughly the size of a Quetzalcoatlus, and it is called a Quetzalcoatlus, both in-canon and behind the scenes, but it's not a Quetzalcoatlus... and this isn't a Giraffatitan vs Brachiosaurus type distinction, either, the "Quetzalcoatlus" in Evolution is just straight up not the right animal.

Before I explain why this definitely isn't a Quetzalcoatlus I think it's important we all grant Acclaim two major leniencies here: one, in 2002 it was still standard practice for literally everyone to get Quetzalcoatlus' face wrong because almost nothing was known about its skull, and two, this is such a generic pop-culture mish-mash of a creature that they could've named it anything (Pteranodon, Tapejara, whatever) and it still would've been wrong. You might be wondering, then- how can I be so sure about what this "Quetz" is when it isn't even a good likeness of any real pterosaur?

Because it's a good likeness of a very specific depiction of a pterosaur from popular culture.

Yes, once again I get the feeling somebody put Walking With Dinosaurs on in the background while they were working and didn't fact check anything. The fourth episode of that famed TV documentary, Giant of the Skies, was centered around "the greatest beast ever to take to the wing", the "one species that dwarfs them all", a giant pterosaur measuring "12 meters from wing tip to wing tip". According to the show that super-pterosaur was Ornithocheirus... though the fragmentary fossils they based that claim off actually came from Tropeognathus... and neither of those animals actually grew to be that big. Whoops? That snafu alone was probably enough to confuse a bunch of early 2000s game developers, but just in case that wasn't enough, a much more famous pterosaur that actually did grow to that size, Quetzalcoatlus, ALSO showed up later in that same documentary. The WWD Quetz looks more like their version of Ornithocheirus/Tropeognathus than it does the real thing and also gets way less screentime, so I think somebody just shrugged their shoulders, mashed both these designs together, and called it a day.

Since we're doing pterosaurs, here's Turok: Evolution's rendition of a Pteranodon. This is another prehistoric animal that virtually everyone gets wrong: not because it's poorly understood or commonly confused with anything else but just because nobody seems to give a shit. Aww...

Toothy, long-tailed "pterodactyls" with clutching talons and bat-like wings have been pop culture staples since day one, but they're basically just medieval wyverns with a slightly newer coat of paint. Most of the features laypeople associate with these animals have nothing to do with real fossil evidence, they've just become such timeless Hollywood stock monsters that it's rare for anybody but super-nerds to know any true facts about them. I probably don't even need to say this next part, but yes, that is a damn shame, because real pterosaurs were fascinating and the general public is definitely missing out.

Jumping back to dinosaurs (and probably things inspired by Walking With Dinosaurs), we also have some rocket-launching Ankylosaurus to contend with. The color and layout of their armor reminds me a lot of the Anky from WWD, which unfortunately was another of that show's worst reconstructions.

Just for the record, I (and I think most people who love dinosaurs) actually think really highly of Walking With Dinosaurs, and I'm genuinely thrilled that this dev team used something other than Jurassic Park for reference! It's just that even good documentaries make mistakes sometimes and paleontology is a very rapidly advancing field. WWD came out 26 years ago as of the writing of this post and science's understanding of these animals has gotten a LOT deeper since then. Looking to a science documentary to inform your dinosaur designs is a commendable decision, but one inadvertent similarity between the BBC's Mesozoic magnum opus and Jurassic Park is that they both got so popular that the general public took everything they said as gospel truth. An extra five minutes of fact checking could've improved each of these WWD-inspired designs quite a lot, I think.

Anyway, sorry to beat a dead dinosaur. I won't spend much longer talking about poor Ankylosaurus here- it's another popular but extremely poorly understood dino with a particularly long, weird history of being depicted completely and totally wrong in virtually everything. I'm not sure there's a single specific detail that the Turok: Evolution version gets right, but alas, that has become normal for this genus.

Instead of harping on these long-legged rocket lizards or anything else for any longer I'll just recommend two video game Ankylosaurus designs that are actually really, truly excellent. If you're curious about what this animal might've actually looked like in life then please look no further than Saurian and Prehistoric Kingdom. I can't speak to the quality of either game, I've never played them and don't know anything about their dev teams, but both have Ankylosaurus models based on real fossils, not tropes or TV, and they look leagues more realistic than their WWD and JP counterparts.

 

Stegosaurus is one of the most iconic and popular dinosaurs of them all, so it's kind of a shock that Evolution is the first time one popped up in a Turok game! In fact I think it's the only time it's popped up in a Turok game, since it got cut from the 2008 reboot! Unfortunately ol' Stego is another dino that's more popular than it is well-represented, and as is often the case this specific take on it seems based mostly on really outdated art from the late 1800s and early 1900s. You'd think things that are 135 years out of date wouldn't be making the rounds anymore, but I promise you there are worse looking Stegosaurus toys and stickers for sale in your local general store right now. To be quick about it, the main things wrong here are in the proportions: there's no reason to think Stegosaurus had such a highly arched back, it had a much longer and more flexible tail, and it was just a lot less pudgy and compact in general. Imagine something more elegant and athletic. Or just look at this gorgeous life size replica produced by Blue Rhino Studio (the same people who sculpted that Quetzalcoatlus I'm standing next to)!

Luckily not every dinosaur in Turok: Evolution fares so poorly. This Parasaurolophus looks a bit underfed by modern standards (the tail especially should be a lot thicker), but compared to the Anky and Stego in the setting this actually holds up pretty decently! For a model from 2002 I think this is perfectly acceptable. It's aged, but not badly. The pattern helps, too- it's simple, but easy on the eyes. Bonus points for not copying the Jurassic Park look!

The most surprising dinosaur choice in this game by far is Tenontosaurus, an herbivore from the early Cretaceous that most people have probably never heard of! It's best known in the paleo-community for two things: having a crazy long tail and constantly getting drawn as Deinonychus' lunch. Here it's used as a nondescript, low level "basic dino" to fill out some jungle areas in Chapter Six. Nothing especially offensive, but sadly nothing really cool either. It's an okayish model but doesn't have the extra long tail or any interesting patterns or behaviors. Just kind of generic fodder.

Still, I'm impressed it showed up at all! This is the kind of roster choice that really gets my wheels turning. Why was this of all things included? It's never had any kind of widespread popularity, never been in a Jurassic Park movie, and didn't feature in Walking With Dinosaurs. Who on the team picked this specific dinosaur, and why? I'd love to know!

Now unless anyone wants an explanation of what parrots and toucans are that'll do it for the dinosaurs... but wait, there's more!

The same chapter that features Tenontosaurus also introduces players to a new aquatic enemy that probably should've been in these games right from the start: Plesiosaurus! Yes, at long last Tal'Set and the Turok lineage have some true underwater enemies to contend with! Move over, Leapers, these pixelated waters are Nessie territory now!

I have mixed feelings on this one, though. On one hand I was excited just to see a plesiosaur finally getting featured, and aesthetically it's superior to most of the A-list dinosaurs! It's got a nice sleek shape that feels appropriate for a marine animal, is surprisingly graceful in its movements, and has an eye-pleasing, naturalistic looking spot-and-stripe pattern stretching all the way from its head to its tail. That's good stuff!

On the other hand, though, it's also one of the least accurate depictions of a plesiosaur I've ever seen. I say "plesiosaur" as a general term instead of Plesiosaurus specifically because it doesn't really matter here: there just isn't any animal in this order that looks like this. The elongated, barrel-chested body is pretty uncharacteristic for this kind of marine reptile and the long-necked plesiosaurs like Plesiosaurus especially tended to have much shorter, broader waists than this. The rear flippers are way, way too small while the tail is too big, and the head.... uh?

What ptheven...?

Yeah I'm not sure what happened with the head. That is one hell of an overbite, and for some reason the shape of the head is almost like a Giraffatitan. Baffling stuff.

While still on the subject of plesiosaurs I'll also briefly mention that there was almost a short-necked example on this roster too, Kronosaurus, and it looked to have been a much bigger, scarier enemy. An unkillable water hazard or stage boss, perhaps? It had a decidedly stylized look with some inexplicable, almost pterosaur-esque doodads added on, but looked pretty damn cool in my opinion. Shame it didn't make it in, the more Mesozoic water monsters the better! I like the countershading too, kind of gives it a leopard seal vibe. Very intimidating!

And yes, I am using this not-Liopleurodon as further evidence that the Turok devs watched WWD!

 

Another Turok-first for Evolution was the inclusion of prehistoric mammals and non-modern animals that appeared after the dinosaurs. This was neither the first nor the last time that Acclaim intended to put a sabertooth cat in the Lost Land, but it is the only time it actually came to fruition! These big burly cats- presumably Smilodons- show up pretty early in the game and act as rush-tanks that the player needs to forcefully distance themselves from. They have a natural "push back" built in and go sliding in reverse any time you hit them with a sufficiently powerful weapon, a mechanic you'll have to exploit if you want to survive running into them. It only looks believable when you're facing them head-on (shoot them from the side or back and you'll see they just teleport backwards no matter what you do) but the constant need to push them off you makes for a memorable encounter! It's pretty neat that they're treated as tank-types in this because a lot of the saberteeth (Smilodon, Homotherium, Xenosmilus) actually were more robust than modern big cats. They tended to be really muscular and stout with longer front limbs and had burly, front-heavy proportions almost more like bears than lions or tigers (oh my).

There's not much to say about the appearance of this creature (it's mostly what you'd expect with the low-poly limits of the era), but this IS one of the rare instances where there might be a little to say about the accuracy of an extinct animal's colors! The puma-inspired tan and white here is very handsome and seemed to be popular at the time (Carnivores: Ice Age and the animated Ice Age film went similar routes), but what teency-weency evidence we poor humans have suggest that this might not've been the real look of these cats. A mummified Homotherium cub uncovered last year shows that at least some saber-cats were red-haired, and based on its relation to the living clouded leopard and one very hotly contested petroglyph Smilodon might have been intricately spotted. None of this rules out Evolution's spotless tan look, but it is a fun subject to think about!

After this things get way more surprising, though. Turok: Evolution is just full of ice age curveballs!

First of all, there's no woolly mammoth! Not even a woolly rhino! Both were intended to be in the game but failed to make the cut. Usually when you get a sabertooth the mammoth at least is a give-in, but nope, not here! Stranger than that, though, is what did make the cut. Let's get into it!

 

 

These big "Axe Beak" birds are a bit of a paradox because there's a good argument to be made for them being one of the least and one of the most weird picks on this part of the roster. On the surface you might be inclined to only think the former, because if you have even a teency bit more prehistoric exposure than a Jurassic film or two you'll know that this is what's called a "terror bird". They appear sporadically but reliably throughout all kinds of lesser known paleo-media like made for TV documentaries, old movies, the Impossible Pictures Primeval show, and Ark: Survival Evolved, so this isn't the biggest surprise. As is almost always the case with terror birds they're not given a specific genus name here, but based off their tall, slender build and plumed crest (an artistic flourish that appears in many vintage paintings and one of the BBCs other paleo-documentaries, Walking With Beasts) I'd say they're probably Phorusrhacos. That terror bird in particular was at its most "popular" all the way back in the 1880s and early 1900s and hasn't been regularly name-dropped since at least the '60s, but that's not the weird part.

It's also a damn decent depiction of Phorusrhacos, much better than the team's doomed attempt at the way better known and more famous woolly mammoth, but that's not the weird part either! No, the really weird part about this is that all of Turok: Evolution's supplementary material insists this is a Velociraptor.

Huh?

You wanna talk about development stories I'd like to know more about? This is number one on my list.

Yeah, so according to Acclaim's strategy guide and the now-defunct official website, Axe Beaks are artificial dinosaurs designed to wage war on humans. Described as "genetically engineered from the Velociraptor by (Lord) Tyrannus", they were "created to surpass [their] biological brethren".

...Ooooookay.

Well, credit where credit is due: I wasn't expecting that. Good job thinking outside the box, I guess? This is just the funkiest thing ever. There's already a real prehistoric predator that's just like this (and somebody at Acclaim knew about it because they based this design around artistic representations of it), so why did the art team try to invent an "all new" creature that looks and acts exactly the same? There's no trace of raptor influence in the Axe Beak's visual design and it's actually weaker than the raptors, so... I just don't understand any part of this.

My best guess is maybe the Axe Beak was originally going to be something more chimeric and dinosaur-like, but early concept art shows it as a Phorusrhacos too, so I don't know. When and why this creative decision was made is an absolute mystery to me, and quite frankly it's starting to hurt my head. Let's just move on to something more conventionally weird, shall we...?

This funky little guy is a Doedicurus, a type of glyptodont- giant armadillo relatives that coexisted with early man. They're in almost exactly the same boat as the Axe Beak, sans the weird identity crisis: Doedicurus itself is rarely ever named but its look-alikes pop up in (mostly older) paleo-media often enough that you could probably get away with calling it a D-tier ""celebrity"". Got a little gasp out of me when I saw it, it did!

Even more interesting than its inclusion though, at least in my opinion, is its appearance. Anybody else imagining this thing in an underground cave? Like a primitive armadillo gremlin? Hairless... green??

I've got no idea why any of these decisions were made, but the vibes are immaculate and I know exactly where this little critter belongs.

"Her name is Fifi and I love her."

Also green for some unknown reason is our penultimate warm-blooded weirdo (you're in the home stretch now, I swear) the Palaeotherium. Full disclosure: this is by far the most rarely read name on Evolution's list, but I made them second-to-last here because I think the other mammal's an even weirder choice.

Anyway! Lifelong nerds like myself might recognize this creature, but I wouldn't blame them if they didn't. It's a lesser known relative of the early horse Eohippus, a creature which on its own might not even be as "popular" as the likes of Phorusrhacos and Doedicurus, but while that animal at least got to be in The Valley of Gwangi and a bunch of vintage children's books and documentaries, the only time I can recall anyone showing the public a Palaeotherium was at London's Crystal Palace Park. In 1852. Where it was mistakenly depicted as a tapir. So... basically nobody on the street is gonna have any idea what this thing is. It's probably the deepest pull in the whole game, but as promised I think I saved the beast for last. Uh, I mean the best! Or do I...?

 

 

This is the creature in Turok: Evolution that really made my jaw drop: an Eocene dinoceratan, the "Beast of the Uinta Mountains", Uintatherium anceps. It's one of the oldest, weirdest prehistoric mammals to feature in Turok and it would be a tremendous understatement to call it a rare sight in video games. This cameo represents one of only three times it's ever been in any kind of video game (the other two were Jurassic World mobile games). It doesn't fare much better in other media.

I think there are five Uintatherium toys/figures in existence and only one of them existed when I was a kid. The only movies I think it's been in, ever, are The Last Dinosaur and Journey to the Beginning of Time: the former is a 1977 collaboration between the minds behind Godzilla and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (no... really) that mistakenly called it a ceratopsian dinosaur and the latter is a 1955 Czechoslovakian quasi-documentary. Between both films it was onscreen for about two minutes. Two and a half if you're generous and count the moments when it's offscreen and people are talking about it.

Even when I was growing up, as an obsessive little prehistory buff who gobbled up every bit of information he could get his hands on, living through one of the biggest pop-culture "dinosaur booms" in history, I rarely ever saw this animal depicted. I knew it from a handful of picture books and a made-in-China dollar-store toy.

It is NOT a genus I expected to see in a multi-million dollar budgeted mainstream first person shooter.

But how wonderful is it that I was wrong? Sure, it is only a brief cameo. An easy to miss fodder creature with no sound effects or attack animations. Who cares! Somehow this obscure, 56 million year old evolutionary dead-end still managed to make its way into a global, multi-platform major release and co-starred with Turok the freaking Dinosaur Hunter. That's incredible. Hell yeah, Uinta Beast. Good for you!

On that happy note, I take my leave. This concludes my coverage of the Acclaim Turok series, and maybe my coverage of the Turok games in general, but who knows. I didn't enjoy the 2008 reboot attempt back when I first tried it, but maybe I ought to track it down and give it another go? If nothing else I'm sure I'll be playing the upcoming Turok: Origins game, which looks to have some pretty wild alien / alternate reality "dinosaur" designs in it! There's also the rest of the comic books- I hear the OGs are more fun than the 90's run? Hmmm. Something to think about!

Until next time, everyone!