Game reviews: Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Baseball Riot
Turok is a disappointing cash-in and Baseball Riot is just a smartphone game that somehow ended up on a console
Night Dive Studios
The second age of the first-person shooter might be slowly whimpering its way towards an expected end, Call of Duty and its many spin-offs and rip-offs seemingly indistinguishable in a gaming world that’s grown bigger and bolder. But there’s nothing like nostalgia to help us remember the old-old days, and here comes Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, an innovative FPS from the genre’s early days on the classic Nintendo 64 console. This reboot of sorts is available for PC, and has been long awaited by nostalgic fans, the game holding a cult status not dissimilar to that of fellow N64 shooter GoldenEye. But unlike the many remakes of that James Bond classic, Turok is a bit of a sad cash-grab, with little seemingly done to place it into the modern world of hi-def updates.
All the hallmarks you remember are on board: prehistoric settings alongside futuristic worlds; a super-strong Native American armed with sci-fi weaponry; dinosaurs, cyborgs, time travel portals – the crazed comic book come to life in first-person form. But that’s where the nostalgia ends, and this re-release quickly reminds you that its gameplay came from the simpler times of Doom and Duke Nukem, rather than anything resembling modern virtual warfare. But really, we can handle that. We get that Turok is a bit of a relic, but did they have to put absolutely zero effort in buffing it up? Graphics are as jagged and blocky as the days when you suffered through a boxy low-res TV, and the polygon textures and environments really do hammer home just how badly the game visuals have aged. The only real positive change we could see – and granted, this is almost 20 years we’re talking about – is the substantially improved control system. Turok’soriginal console itineration suffered from a mostly irrational way of looking and aiming, and that’s all finally been set right. Better still, is the choice between keyboard-and-mouse or custom game pad. Turok is the worst kind of reboot offender, a greedy attempt to cash in on rose-tinted memories, with the bare minimum done to put it into a modern context. If we weren’t so desperate to buy back our childhood, we’d give it the dreaded single star. Sadly, we’re exactly the kind of suckers they’re looking for.
