Oh, it's been so long since I played a game worth writing about. Feels good. Turok: Evolution is the 2002 prequel… I guess to the first Turok game? I played that game a little a long time ago until I got lost and didn’t know what to do so I don’t really know how I feel about Turok games going in other than I like the idea of shooting dinosaurs. Evolution has that weird mix of sci-fi and fantasy with dinosaurs you get from Dinosaur Planet or rather Starfox: Adventures. Look at that cover. I mean REALLY look at it. Eew. Is that torn skin in the bottom teeth? WTF? Can they do that? I remember when I bought the Andrew W. K. album ‘I Get Wet’ on CD. The wrapper had a black bar covering Andrew’s bloody nose.
This is a well established franchise. You know what to expect. It’s an FPS where you play as a Native American man who’s been flung into… the distant future... past. Something, something, kill dinosaur people. You know, how exactly DOES all this work? How are there humans, birds, monkeys, regular dinosaurs and anthropomorphic dinosaurs with alien technology all in one time and place? Did they ALL time travel or is this an alternate dimension? It's kind of weird. This is like the island from Swiss Family Robinson or Lost.
The game controls are default inverted for look up and down which is egregiously wrong so I turn it off and also bump up the sensitivity on both axis so I can turn quicker. When I turn off the game and come back later the settings have reverted to their default positions. It doesn't save the settings. Every time I turn the game back on I first have to re-enter the settings again. (That’s not redundant if it’s the third time it’s happened) It's not even that quick of a fix either. It's three screens deep in the pause menu. It's a small thing but it's incredibly annoying.
The game uses the traditional med pack health system. The levels have no checkpoints and only save after you’ve completed them so some of these levels you’re going to get REALLY familiar with. The game also has cheat codes. I didn't try any but definitely thought about it after restarting a level for the dozenth time.
Aside from the typical FPS gameplay there are also many TPS flying segments. (Actually they can also be FPS if you like that camera angle.) Holy shit do I hate these flying segments more than anything. You are supposed to fly a weapon enabled pteranodon or… Quetzal...coatlus… Is that a thing? Anyway, you fly through these horribly cluttered jungles, caves and canyons populated with enemies and obstacles, some of which break or fall, and you are not allowed to touch anything. (Imagine the Death Star trench and the Death Star interior are combined.) If you touch something, you die and start over. You don't even have to smash straight into it. You can graze the side of a canyon wall and it kills you instantly. Sometimes you'll get lucky and deflect, taking damage but that's pretty rare. Easily the biggest challenge here is not the enemies but never hitting anything. Going back to Starfox, imagine playing Starfox where you're not allowed to hit anything with your Arwing or you die and start the level over. And on a weird side note I just realized you fly a LOT more in this Turok game than you did in Starfox: Adventures... and the flying is even better integrated into the game. Your flying weapons do jack shit. You have infinite .50 cal rounds which you can upgrade for a few seconds with a pickup. Rockets are the only thing that reliably kills stuff with any sort of efficiency but you can only carry 20 and have to stock them with pickups. Every chapter that involves flying inevitably brings you to a part where you have to destroy something big which requires you to blow up several moving and/or partially concealed weak points. You're surrounded by enemies shooting at you from all directions in close quarters. Your turning radius is the size of a soccer field. So to recap, survive or destroy dozens of enemies shooting at you. Blow up the weak points by flying to the outer perimeter wall of the level and turning around for a three seconds or less approach to hopefully line up a shot and thread the needle to score like one hit out of probably 15-20 necessary hits before pulling a hard evasive turn because remember DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING or you're starting over.
The game does this stupid thing where you lose your weapons. Not like you get captured and they get taken away but you start the next level and some of them will just have vanished from your arsenal. I'm aware you can't switch to a gun that you have no ammo for even if you have the gun but that's not what the problem is. I haven't been able to use the bow since probably the start of chapter three. I KNOW I have it. It's one of the two weapons you start out with for fuck sake. I've never run out of ammo for it. I still see arrow quivers lying around EVERYWHERE later in the game and when I walk over them I can't pick them up but it says “Need bow” as if I don't have it. Why don't I have it? Where did it go? This has happened with other weapons that I knew I owned and had ammo for like the flechette gun and rocket launcher. They just seem to come and go as they please between levels except for that damn bow and the pistol both of which I never saw again. And without the pistol I can't even snipe and that really cripples you strategically. This is such a pain in the ass when you get in a tight spot and your arsenal has been randomized and downsized leaving you with less ammo and possibly some very inflexible weapon combos. I never even had a tek bow until the end of the game for like one level and then it vanished. Oh and also the flamethrower showed up again briefly after being absent for like 80% of the game. On another note, my secondary fire on my launcher doesn't work even though I can see the ammo number and the loaded ammo in the launcher. This whole thing blows.
There is no shortage of total bullshit moments in this game whether they come by chance or by design. You can fall through the gap between the platform and cable gondola and die in two levels even though the gap isn’t physically big enough to fall through. So mind the gap and jump like an asshole while entering and exiting gondolas. There’s a part in the city assault where you come across a sleg at a mounted machine gun. If you look at him, you die instantly. That’s not an exaggeration. It doesn’t even matter if you have full health. You die before you can even attack or maybe even see him. Those guns are powerful but they aren’t the finger of God so I don’t know why it’s like this. It’s completely unreasonable. I got past this part by crouching behind a pile of rubble and lobbing grenades blindly in the general direction of the gun. I got lucky I guess because he’s far away and grenades suck. There’s a level where you have to hunt down 10 snipers to make it through a bombed out city block. You’re supposed to stay in the buildings and out of the streets because you’ll get shot supposedly by snipers but it doesn’t matter if there is just one sniper left and they have no visual of you and you are running. You get “shot” and take damage if you step into the street. LAZY. You’re not actually getting attacked by an enemy. You’re getting magically penalized for not following the mission parameters. There are times where you are deep in the jungle and can't see anything because the foliage is so thick. One level in particular that I remember made you collect three keys to open a gate to advance. The area had the triple threat of low visibility, traps and raptors. Even if you could see, most of the traps are undetectable because they drop down from the jungle canopy which is too high to see and there's no evidence on the ground. All you get is a sound and one second to move your ass. The keys are in pretty difficult/obscure places. The first is atop a natural log bridge. I’m pretty sure I never found the actual way you’re supposed to get up there because it wasn’t at all apparent. I instead fluked my way jumping up on the low end of the log very particularly like a game tester trying to break the game. The second key requires you to fall off a deadly cliff and land on a super fucking tiny platform. It’s so small you have to be as close to the edge without falling off to be able to see and line up with it.
Platforming it such a bitch. You shouldn't have to do it in this game but there are definitely segment that require finesse. The biggest problem is that when running to jump from the edge of one thing to another you always reach the edge sooner than you think you should and just fall off because you jump too late. This is compounded by the fact that you don’t jump very well so you want to try for those extra inches.
The ladders in this game are garbage. You can never just walk into them and climb. You can't get on until you've satisfied whatever finicky angle or altitude required for engaging the climbing mode. Then when you do grab on you're probably situated on it poorly and just fall off again halfway up. When you're climbing a ladder you are forced to look straight up which becomes an issue when you get to the top because any enemies you're exposed to up there get to take pot shots at you while you get off the ladder and reorient the camera. Its natural or at least believable that people glance up when climbing a ladder but they're not going to keep looking up until they're standing on the top rung. That's ridiculous. Also it's easy to just fall straight back down when transitioning back from climbing to walking and it takes VERY LITTLE height to injure or even kill you.
The levels get more obnoxious and less interesting in setting as the game progresses. Jungle? Good. Mountain? Good. Cave? Good. Ruins? Good. Temple? Good. Rural Outpost? Good. Desert? Okay I guess. Urban combat? Fuck that shit. You can get that anywhere. I didn't pick this up to play a shitty CoD clone. I want to be Rambo in the jungle and killing dinosaurs. That’s your thing. Let’s do that. Past the game’s halfway point I don't even see plants or wild dinosaurs anymore. Booooooooooring.
That big setting change to urban/industrial interior and the random weapons are what really killed the joy for me. I’m a masochist or maybe I just really hate to quit any video game or show i start until the bitter end no matter how awful it is. This game is definitely hit and miss and I don’t think most people are willing to stick with Evolution through the misses for an overall meh.
