Not counting the trio of excellent remasters from Nightdive Studios, it’s been 16 years since the last Turok title. In 2008, we received a mediocre reboot from Propaganda Games on the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC that turned the badass hunter into an Ellen Ripley ripoff as they and a crew of similarly burly marines crash-landed on an alien planet filled with dinosaurs.
It should have been easy to pull this concept off and make it an incredibly cool shooter, but in almost every way it was a painfully dull affair. The characters had no personality, the guns lacked impact and imagination, and the mixture of dinosaur and human enemies were no fun to fight. It was a death knell for Turok, and it has been in hibernation ever since.
Turok Is Long Overdue A Comeback
But despite its long absence in the gaming world, Turok is a name that many still remember fondly. It was an icon of the Nintendo 64 era, and you can’t help being swept up by its basic but effective premise. Now it’s making a comeback in Turok: Origins, an all-new multiplayer experience from Saber Interactive that broke cover at The Game Awards.
When I was shown the trailer ahead of the ceremony, it wasn’t the revival that I expected to see. Origins isn’t a first-person shooter with a single central character and story for us to follow, but rather a third-person action title built to accommodate three players, as each of you take control of Turok warriors, all with their own distinct skills and abilities. You’ll be taking on humanoid and dinosaur enemies alike in a mixture of different stages, modes, and maps designed to take you on a galaxy-spanning journey of dinosaur extermination.
Considering this is coming from Saber Interactive, it’s hard not to draw direct comparisons to the recently released Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2: another third-person shooter with both a single-player and co-op campaign, allowing you to take control of different characters as you exterminate a variety of enemies with different weapons and skills.
You’re free to give your characters a customised edge and return again and again to progress in Space Marine 2 and Turok: Origins is eager to follow in its footsteps, either coincidentally or not. I’d be lying if I wasn’t a little miffed that Turok is making a comeback only to be turned into a co-op shooter we’ve seen time and time again, but there is still hope it will deliver a fun experience. Besides, it’s difficult to figure out exactly what Turok is supposed to be in the modern era.
I Can’t Tell If Taking Turok: Origins Online Is A Great Or Terrible Idea
The reveal trailer itself is a brief CG teaser for the most part, showing Turok hunters all with different weapons and abilities preparing to take on multiple planets full of beasties. The first character is seen sprinting through a luscious jungle environment before throwing down a shock trap of some sort to hinder a nearby raptor, then he hurls a tomahawk directly into its face, followed by a neon-blue arrow for good measure. His friends appear behind him just as a vast alien ship spawns overhead, and the focus switches to small snippets of gameplay.
Some ethereal blue energy appears to seep into the Turok’s exosuit after killing the raptor, so it’s likely this energy can be used to either activate abilities or take on a select few qualities from slain enemies. It would go a long way in explaining all the cool powers.
Gameplay looks like a fairly pedestrian third-person shooter as you take on dinosaurs, bugs, and similar creatures which are all of exaggerated sizes and styles. The highlight was a boss fight featuring a triceratops where you need to dodge around a larger arena while targeting a slew of weak points. We only see one of the alien abilities I mentioned earlier, where a Turok can be seen producing vine-like appendages from its body to slam a raptor into the ground.
These special moves are going to be what sets Turok: Origins apart from the competition and potentially makes it more than a generic third-person shooter, while I hope the dinosaurs and bugs you go up against are interesting enough to keep me invested for repeat playthroughs. It leaves us with a lot of questions and not many answers, including whether putting a multiplayer spin on Turok instead of serving up a dedicated single-player effort is going to seal its fate long before release.
If this isn’t a one-and-done experience, but a live service of sorts where we’ll be expected to jump into seasonal updates and keep up with everything, I worry nobody is going to care. It’s made worse by recent failures like Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which delivered something similar in a landscape where audiences were already telling developers they are sick and tired of the industry chasing online trends.
Is Turok: Origins crashing onto the scene and doomed to make the same mistakes, or does it have something hidden up its sleeve to blow us away? It’s too early to tell, but that doesn’t stop me from being worried.