I will admit to buying Turok around launch last year, despite everyone being certain that the series has long been dead. They weren’t wrong, but they weren’t correct either. The game was certainly not worth spending $60 on, but amongst all of its poor executions it had a lot of good ideas. For anyone that wants to be an aspiring game designer, I would consider Turok a must-play title not just to see what it does wrong, but what it does right and what can be done better.

First, let’s get into some of the basic things done wrong. Casting John Madden as the voice actor for your evil soldiers is a bad idea. Especially for all of the evil soldiers. While a lack of variety in voice acting may work for, say, Half-Life 2, it’s not going to cut it for Turok. The lack of dialog and restriction to one voice actor makes it all too repetitive. If you need to, get some of the programmers, artists or designers in there to do voices. Just do something to create some level of variety.

The computing world also has something called Usability tests, which are excellent to see if your product is designed well for a wide variety of users. Such a thing can catch whether your controls are poor or not early in development. Turok could have used this for its look sensitivity and some other functionality. Everyone I know that has played the game has had to turn the sensitivity way down in order to have a hope of being accurate at all. The game also features an ability to dive to the side by simply strafing to the left or right and pressing the jump button, but if you are moving even slightly forward or backward, you won’t dive. You’ll just jump, and that rocket or dinosaur you were trying to narrowly avoid hits you anyway. It’s a nice feature, but it becomes difficult to use because it is so precise.

In order to provide the player with a level of immersion, the game tries to realistically throw players backward when struck hard by a foe or the force of a concussive blast. Vision blurs, the character flies onto his back and all you see are your feet ahead of you, lying on the ground. In terms of immersion, it certainly does work. It can be pretty cool to suddenly be thrown back from a blast, thrown over a five foot drop and be left thinking “what the heck just happened?” as you might in real life.

The problem is that, as these segments are running, you have no control and yet still take damage. So if you are caught off guard by a rocket or a dinosaur and there are foes in the area, then you suffer even greater penalty as it takes several seconds for the game to get you back on your feet and in control. If the game gave you a brief moment of invincibility, but also refrained your health from refreshing during this time, then it would allow the player to gather their bearings and have a chance to dive into cover. Instead, the game often punishes you for making the smallest mistake, and you may be sent back to a checkpoint that forces you to replay the last five to ten minutes of the game.

Two of the game’s best ideas and implementations are the co-op and the knife. Instead of simply having players go through the single player campaign with another player, there are three maps designed specifically for co-operative play. While it would be nice to have the option to play the single player maps as well, by having brand new maps for a multiplayer campaign the game’s replay value is increased. The major issue here is that the difficulty for these maps is not adjusted based on the number of players. You are given a limited amount of respawns, an excellent balancing tool, but if you only have two or even three players the maps are nearly impossible. The maps are only reasonably playable if you have a full four player game, and considering how few units of the game have sold it isn’t likely you’ll have too many friends willing to hop on and play. You have to convince friends to bargain bin dive just for a small feature of the game. Even with four players, the game has several moments that seem awfully cheap or poorly explained. While the co-op is fun and a nice change of pace from other similar games, it is harmed way too much by the rest of the game’s faults.

The knife is the best design element of the entire game simply because it makes a once useless weapon in shooters a deadly asset. It merely takes a bit of skill to use it properly. Against other human foes, you have to make sure you sneak up on them without being seen. This becomes troublesome as the game often offers too many enemies and not enough foliage to be as stealthy as they urge you to be. The game would have done much better to mimic Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay in this aspect, as it works very similarly. Approach an enemy that hasn’t noticed you, and when the game prompts for you to pull the right trigger you execute a brutal killing move. Unlike Riddick, simply doing this will probably alert the enemy and get you noticed. The game also has little indication of how well you are hidden, unlike Riddick.

Where the knife truly shines is facing the dinosaur opponents. The game only truly gives you enough ammunition to face human opponents, and you will quickly run out if you try and shoot down the raptors as well. This will force you to use the knife, which is actually the best option for dinosaurs. As they get close, the game will prompt you to pull the right trigger. Unfortunately, the game can be a bit finicky here and you may miss the prompt by less than a second and weakly stab at nothing. However, if you get the timing right, which most of the time a player probably will, then you will perform a quick, cinematic stealth kill. It is important to note that, similarly to the segments where you are knocked off your feet, you are vulnerable to damage during these scenes that you cannot control. Temporary invincibility would have been an excellent favor during these moments as well.

Many dinosaur opponents may also get you into a sort of hold, prompting a quick time event reaction of some sort. These will typically be to either mash back and forth between right and left triggers or to rapidly waggle the left thumbstick. While quick time events are becoming notorious as an over used and often annoying tool for game development, the one thing Turok certainly does well is offer instant response to your actions. As you mash the triggers or waggle the thumbstick, your character will stab at the dinosaur’s head in reaction. This provides instant feedback to the player that they are making progress of some sort. Plenty of games utilizing quick time events, particularly the recent Resident Evil 5, do not provide adequate feedback and increase frustrating. Turok shows how feedback can be utilized to show progress as well as continue being cinematic.

Most players won’t find a lot of redeeming value in the latest Turok, especially if they remember loving the original on the Nintendo 64. However, any gamer that has the dream of becoming a game designer one day, or simply likes to evaluate and examine different ideas and designs, may find some value if they can find the game for $10 or $15. It may not be a must have, but there are enough interesting and good ideas that deserve to be done right.