Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (N64) impressions

[A Black Falcon]

I just played through the whole first level (I am at the beginning of level 2 now) and WOAH is this game great. I mean, I have and have played some of Turok 2, Turok Rage Wars, and Turok 3, but this one's fantastic... a bit different from the later ones. It's not as insanely hard as Turok 2, and I do like the jungle setting too. There are lots of great touches like how music changes when you go under water or in a cave, etc. The huge, exploration-heavy levels are of course the best thing about the game, and I love that stuff, particularly with the game's good onscreen automap. I like FPSes where you're not just running from room to room shooting people, but spend more of your time exploring and finding things and solving puzzles than you do shooting... and this game is definitely like that, like a Jedi Knight 1 sort of. Turok 2 is like this but it goes farther with it, too far, and ends up just being impossibly hard. Turok 3 is much more linear and railed, and tries instead for a more Half-Life (or Jedi Knight, minus some of the exploration) style of the game being a sequence of canned encounters... great game too, and it does still have exploration, but different from either of the first two. Rage Wars of course is an arena shooter, Quake 3/Unreal Tournament style.

It does have a lot of platform jumping, which is of course tough in first person (Jedi Knight helped with this problem by having a third person camera you could use, so though the game had a good bit of jumping, it was easier than Turok...), but you get used to it I think.

Oh, and did I mention that the sound effects and graphics are both great, better than I expected? The dinosaur howls can be creepy sometimes when you're low on health, where are they going to come from next...

Really, fantastic game so far.