Jan 2, 2008

In the late ’90s Turok helped mould the first-person shooter scene for console gamers, but later installments saw a downturn in the dinosaur hunter’s fortunes as he swapped genre-defining action for barrel-scraping tedium.

The latest installment, simply titled Turok, seeks to return the series to its roots and to wisely distance itself from 2003’s clunky Turok: Evolution. Three years in the making, it updates the comic book hero’s mythology by casting him as a Mohawk-sporting black ops soldier on the hunt for his former mentor and war criminal Roland Cain.

The game takes its cue from other next-gen shooters, providing an expansive main campaign coupled with a typically frenetic multiplayer mode. The single-player game is mission-based with Turok and his allies traversing vast environments and stalking enemy troops while trying to stay off the menu of the native dinosaurs. What really impresses here is the sense that you are exploring a living environment: dinosaurs behave like you’d expect - grazing, stalking prey and protecting their young. A nicely strategic touch allows players to use the native flora and fauna to their advantage by luring dinos into enemy camps with a well-aimed flare or crouching in the long grass to cruelly pin an enemy soldier to a tree with a well-placed arrow.