Turok: Dinosaur
Am I the only person with fond memories of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the N64? It stood out as being a bit different, with a bit of imagination, most of it taken from the original comic but still well implemented. A native American hunter fighting dinosaurs. Pretty cool stuff, except for some ridiculous bits of platforming nonsense.
And now, fast forward to 2008 and Touchstone publish a new Turok game. Now the story is about a dumb knucklehead fighting dinosaurs with a dumb knucklehead buddy. Based on playing the demo I have drawn some early conclusions.
Dumb knuckleheads numbers 1 and 2 are both unlikeable and look rubbish. The dinosaurs look okay but behave stupidly. The aiming is irritating. The weapons are rubbish. The environments look rubbish (mostly because the lighting and shadowing varies between rubbish and nonexistent). The level design is rubbish. The game often just makes things jump out or jump at you with no warning. It's all rubbish.
The only redeeming feature in the demo is that while they've got the de rigeur dual-wielding that most shooters feel they have to have, they actually let you choose which hand to hold which gun in. Wow.
Oh, I should mention that when it does this it resorts to putting icons on-screen to explain which buttons to press for each hand, even though the game is obviously intended to have no HUD most of the time.
I honestly can't believe that a publisher would release a demo like this. Surely they should know how bad it is and decide not to have a demo, hoping to trick franchise and genre fans into buying it. It's just not in the same ballpark as other modern shooters.
How do they hope to compete with the large number of awesome shooters around these days? Propaganda Games, who developed this, are probably at their wits' end with the publisher because it simply doesn't seem ready for release. Either that or they really did intend it to be like this. Maybe it's meant to be retro...
And now, fast forward to 2008 and Touchstone publish a new Turok game. Now the story is about a dumb knucklehead fighting dinosaurs with a dumb knucklehead buddy. Based on playing the demo I have drawn some early conclusions.
Dumb knuckleheads numbers 1 and 2 are both unlikeable and look rubbish. The dinosaurs look okay but behave stupidly. The aiming is irritating. The weapons are rubbish. The environments look rubbish (mostly because the lighting and shadowing varies between rubbish and nonexistent). The level design is rubbish. The game often just makes things jump out or jump at you with no warning. It's all rubbish.
The only redeeming feature in the demo is that while they've got the de rigeur dual-wielding that most shooters feel they have to have, they actually let you choose which hand to hold which gun in. Wow.
Oh, I should mention that when it does this it resorts to putting icons on-screen to explain which buttons to press for each hand, even though the game is obviously intended to have no HUD most of the time.
I honestly can't believe that a publisher would release a demo like this. Surely they should know how bad it is and decide not to have a demo, hoping to trick franchise and genre fans into buying it. It's just not in the same ballpark as other modern shooters.
How do they hope to compete with the large number of awesome shooters around these days? Propaganda Games, who developed this, are probably at their wits' end with the publisher because it simply doesn't seem ready for release. Either that or they really did intend it to be like this. Maybe it's meant to be retro...
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Link | Comment