Yes, I have already finished Propagandas new game; Turok. Upon completion my cousin asked me: “How did you like it? Was the ending good?” Allow me to share what I said to him. Turok is a like delivering a baby only to find out you have to perform a c-section. You go in hoping for a miraculous creation, following a messy incision, followed by a short lived spectacle then you are forced to close what you have started. I went into Turok expecting an awesome experience; I remember the glory days of the N64 playing this game to no end. In fact I recently bought Turok for a friend who currently owns a N64 just so I could go over to his house and play it. Sadly I was mistaken… if I wanted to play another bullshit Gears of War clone using the new Unreal Engine I would either play Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3… not this piece of crap.

That answers the first question; “How did I like it”, now to move onto the second “Was the ending good”. My cousin is an interesting character, he usually rates games on how interesting the ending is. I find that “reviewing” structure to be quite obscure however in this situation it fits. I am going to ruin the ending for you… I’m not even going to put my usually spoiler tag… because the ENDING SUCKS! Maybe by reading this article I will save you from the disappointment of this game so you can do other things…. like widdle.

So lets get started. At the end of the game you decide it would be stupid to leave an exploding planet so that you can seek revenge on someone who is going to die on it anyway. You head out on a hero mission to kill the antagonist of the plot. Finally you reach him, cue CUT-SCREEN… cue another CUT SCREEN… and hes dead. Yes, you heard me correctly you don’t actually FIGHT to antagonist of the game. You simple watch as Turok does it for you. This has some slight interactivity… you have to push LT and RT when the game tells you too, but all in all its basically a boss on rails; only this time you don’t have a sweet plastic gun in your hand while you shoot zombies. APPARENTLY the developers of Turok thought that boss was boring and as you make your final “forced” stab you are confronted with a familiar T-Rex; called Momma Scarface. If you don’t want to die an annoying death A MILLION FRECKEN TIMES follow this simple strategy. Find the nearest metal crate… grab the shotgun… play about 40 rounds of ring around the rosy blasting the T-Rex in the face; if you run out of ammo repeat this strategy on another nearby crate. The T-Rex dies you throw some C4 in her eye and you jump on the previously disguarded spacecraft. Some idiot on board says some Bruce Willis catch phrase and we roll credits.

That pretty much sums up my experience with Turok. The worst part is still to come, if you do decide to play through the game beware of the insanely annoying battles. These battles will put you on wits end forcing you to hold back to urge to chuck your controller into your nice new HD TV. It’s sad when loads take longer than it takes you to die afterwards. There are some ridiculous quick save slots zones; example: whilst staring down the barrel of a helicopters mini gun. The friendly AI doesn’t make things any easier… this is quite possibly the stupidest AI I have seen in our slew of next-gen games. I vaguely remember the developers of Turok boasting that their AI was “state of the art”, they are so smart they will “flank you”. Why couldn’t you apply this remarkable AI to my allies? Why do my allies have to run in front of EVERY god damn rocket I shoot.

The original game of my childhood now tarnished.

Allow me to explain what I was expecting in Turok… sweet weapons. Does anyone remember the days of old when the Cerebral bore was the coolest weapon since sliced bread? The only reason I played this game through was because I was hoping the Cerebral bore would show itself once again. Instead I got the normal run of the mill shit weapon assortment we see in every other FPS now a days. Lets see we have a pistol, a minigun, a rocket launcher, a plasma rifle which basically acts like your normal machine gun, a shotgun, a flamethrower and this thing that shoots sticky grenades. Of course I can’t forget your classic bow and arrow (which was actually quite fun to use) and your knife (which also had some pretty cool execution style animations), but all in all the weapons were a grave disappointment.

A couple last things before I close up this review. It seemed to me like Turok was trying much to hard to be like the Half-Life series. Allow me to explain my cooky reasoning. First off the simplistic HUD reminded me of Half-Life 2, but the quiet “lacking of dialogue” main character Turok reminded me a lot of the quiet “lack of dialogue” Gordon Freeman. This would have worked quite well if it wasn’t for the abrupt cut-screens removing the player from the protagonist. Propaganda games had a good thing going for them until they screwed it up.

Lastly, there are some good things to say about Turok. Like the voice acting…. and the repetive feature of setting giant scorpions on fire, but all this is out weighed by its downfalls. Overall I give Turok a:

4/11

Thank you propaganda games for taking away a piece of my childhood.