Ten years ago, a series of games took the creatures from Jurassic Park and combined them with the gunplay of Goldeneye. The result was an idea that struck a lot of gamers like a raptor after their intestines, even though the series lost its novelty by the third installment.

Now, Turok is back to plunge a hunting knife into the cadre of current shooters. In the single player mode, it is refreshing to see our main Mohawked man stalking giant lizards with a bow and arrow, but when the game turns into just another war game against soldiers armed with shotguns and machine guns, that’s when things start to seem a bit tired.

Like Uncharted, there is initially a lot of jungle all around you. The environments look decent, sort of like Halo 3’s early jungle stages. In the single player campaign, you are occasionally interrupted with scripted moments or cut-away cinematics, which seem pretty interesting, but also can be cliché in a Steven Segal movie kind of way.

Turok is part of a squad called Whiskey Company that is trying to extradite themselves from a Lost World — an entire planet crawling with T-Rexes, Raptors, Dilophosaurus, and some others that they just made up.

The dinos are pretty neat, with some interesting behaviors that you can exploit. For example, your shotgun has a secondary function that fires a flare, which the dinos will track. So if you want to lead the raptors to some unsuspecting enemy soldiers, you can do that pretty easily. Other than that, though, we haven’t seen too many options for making the dinos do your bidding.

We also had a chance to check out Turok’s multiplayer mode, and unfortunately, you can’t play as the dinosaurs (Alien vs. Predators style). However, there are dinos running around some parts of the levels, and on occasion we were saved in a firefight by a well-timed raptor attack. To fend off these random dino attacks, you have to push trigger buttons or rotate the analog stick in a context-sensitive, button-pressing minigame.

Although the multiplayer modes we’ve seen (deathmatch, capture the flag, etc.) are pretty ordinary, there are a few interesting weapons. If only we could confirm the return of the cerebral bore! Of the weapons that are in the game, though, the mine-laying gun is perfect for setting an ambush, and the bow and arrow is satisfying to use.

However, the knife that is used for melee combat is terrible. You have to perfectly time the attack when you get an on-screen prompt, instead of just being able to attack when your enemy is in range. You do get a gorgeous killing animation, but it’s lacking quite a bit compared to the satisfying melee of shooters like Halo 3 or Counter-Strike.

Turok is a classic series, but it still has a lot of room for error in a landscape of Call of Duty, Halo, Killzone, and other quality shooters. If it’s going to break out of being average, we’d like to see some variety in the landscape, a greater emphasis on fighting dinosaurs, and a killer story. Otherwise, this series may once again go extinct.

Link: Cerebral bore

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