GGL Wire

One of a few surprise standouts on display at PAX this weekend was the upcoming revamped take on the Turok series, simply called Turok. In development by new studio house Propaganda Games, this improved first-person shooter is actually nothing to laugh at or cast aside. Using Unreal Engine 3, it looks just as beautifully as it plays.

Throughout the three full days of PAX, the lone demo station at the Microsoft booth for the game was constantly busy. Not just with people playing, but with a healthy group of onlookers surrounding the person on the sticks — surely amazed that not only the new Turok looks great, but looks like it doesn’t suck as much as the previous versions we were last left with.

In fact, associate game director John Grimm was more than willing to share those concerns about how previous Turok titles had degraded the once beloved original title. He said Propaganda Games’ goal when acquiring the license was to keep the core elements people loved — hunting dinosaurs — but also add the familiar elements of what makes today’s great FPS titles great. And from what I’ve seen so far, I’d say Grimm and company have done just that.

As I said, the game is beautiful. But really, that’s not where it really shines. Where it clearly stands out from today’s shooters in the console space is in its controls. It’s a tricky balance that not every developer has been able to deliver, but controlling yourself and your weapon of choice in Turok is just about the smoothest experience you’ll find in any shooter on a console today — and for you keyboard and mouse people, you know how important this is. After talking with Grimm and finding out he was involved with Half-Life 2 though, I suppose this welcome familiarity shouldn’t have been such a surprise.

The environment you play in is pretty much what you’d expect with Turok and a guy surrounded by Dinos — it’s a jungle, and a vibrant one at that. Resembling upcoming games such as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the PlayStation 3, Turok certainly can hold its own among some of the best looking games out on the consoles. The action-sequence cutscenes are some of the most visceral experiences you can get in videogames and add a real sense of not only danger, but excitement to what you are doing when you have a controller in your hand.

In the actual gameplay, you’re not only battling roaming prehistoric creatures, but you’re also trying to weave around an open world of bad guys as well. What’s fun about it though, is that not only is it open in a sense of the environment, but also in what you can do as far as interacting with those enemies. For example, there is an item you can fire out in the game called a flare. What this flare does is act as something like a pheromone for Dinosaurs and when they sense it, they want to kill — and they don’t care who they kill. What that means is, if you see some baddies up ahead and hear a Dino in the distance, then shoot a flare in the middle of the men and watch them get chewed up like a piece of beef jerky — there’s really nothing much more satisfying to pull off.

Due in early February for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, if you’re done playing Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4, you’ll be happy to know another quality FPS is on the way and its name is Turok.