The First Person Shooter genre on consoles was relegated to PC ports by early 1997 for the most part. Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were ported to the SNES, and the former was finding ports of uneven quality on just about every piece of 3D or 3D-adjacent hardware out there, such as the Sega 32x, the Atari Jaguar, and, of course, the original Playstation. With the exception of Alien vs Predator (not the PC version, which is altogether different) on the Atari Jaguar and Alien Trilogy on the Playstation, original FPS games were scant on consoles. In general terms, the FPS historically finds its footing on consoles with the release of Rare's Goldeneye in late 1997, but just a few months ahead of that game's landmark release was an oddly overlooked, by historical standards, shooter called Turok: Dinosaur Hunter by Iguana Entertainment and published by Acclaim.
Turok got its start as a comic book series originally released on Dell Comics in the 50s, but was later revived by Valiant comics in 1993. Acclaim was going through changes at the time where it was trying to expand its game production by licensing game characters through comics, shows, and anything else it could to expand profits. With this intention they bought Valiant comics for the IPs and Iguana Entertainment in order to keep game production in house. They showed Iguana Entertainment the IPs they acquired from Valiant that could potentially be turned into a new game, and Iguana found Turok to be the most appealing.
Iguana envisioned Turok as something like Tomb Raider, which was eating up sales and press at the time, but on the Nintendo 64, whose cartridge based technology would allow for faster load times for wide areas. They didn't want to ape Tomb Raider outright, but rather use its sense of exploration and locale as inspiration for what Turok could become. They played around with the idea of a third person view before settling on first person because they thought it would show off the 3D possibilities of the Nintendo 64 the best. This particular trajectory is important, because in a lot of ways, while Turok is most definitely a shooter, the game's ethos doesn't feel all that shooter-y.
Turok tasks the player with first running and gunning their way through a level that ends in a hub of other levels. Gaining access to these levels requires you to collect keys in each of the levels. The way these keys are laid out is bizarre for a shooter. FPS games at the time almost always used a key-and-door system for progression within a level, but that was generally in order to unlock the direct progressive path. For Turok, nearly all of the keys are hidden off the beaten path, usually shown to the player up on a cliff-side out of reach, but sometimes hidden deep within caves or areas completely impossible to see from any other vantage point. Turok wanted you to explore,to collect ammo and newer guns and to find secrets. The required path now required exploration and thorough play, which made it far more akin to Super Mario 64 than you would expect on the outset. While your interaction with this world is primarily like that of a shooter, your objective follows that of a platformer, for better or for worse.
Jumping puzzles start popping up around level 3 in Turok, and while they can be easily adjusted to over time, they never feel quite that good. First person view doesn't give you a good sense of trajectory, limiting your view far too much for tight jumps to feel confident. To make matters worse, momentum is entirely dictated by you holding the direction down. That is, if you let go of forward mid-jump, you will stop dead and fall like a rock straight down. It is contrary to just about every platformer you will ever play, especially Super Mario 64 which is notably floaty.
Platforming aside, the shooting feels rather good for the time. Shotguns have kick to them (and can snipe enemies across the map somehow), explosive weapons shoot enemies into the air (and even topple some trees, which is impressive for '97), and there is a general one-man-army feel to it akin to that of arena shooters. Turok most certainly fits most snugly in the Arena Shooter genre, but it isn't a perfect fit because of its copious and pace-slowing platforming sections. Fleeting impressions of Serious Sam came to mind while playing Turok, although I wouldn't outright say they feel exactly the same (and I am too far out from the last time I played Serious Sam to make any kind of accurate comparison, but the impression was there nonetheless, and often). Being overwhelmed by enemies is normal, and due to high respawn times for a lot of areas, you won't be rid of them until you've spent a mild fortune on ammunition. This can be a boon or detriment to your fun with the game. Keeping mobile is paramount to not only surviving, but also doing well throughout the game. Nothing in Turok ever really stumped like how, say, Quake could. Turok's difficulty is medium at best, as his weaponry and mobility is far too powerful to really edge you particularly close to a game over. If the game didn't limit your lives to 9, there is no telling what number I would have racked up by the end.
The closed combat arenas that make up a bulk of Quake's campaign aren't usually present in much of Turok, instead allowing for large, sprawling, often labyrinthine levels that are easy to get lost in, and not in a good way. The recent HD port of the game added a feature to see a wire map overlay at the hit of the button much like Doom, and without it a couple of the levels in Turok would be a much more frustrating affair. Blurry textures, which were good at the time and roughly the peak the Nintendo 64 could output, and repeating models for ruins and bridges don't help matters, but it also comes with the territory of late 90s games. Level design on a whole is "okay" at best and "kitchen sink" at worst. The levels sprawling nature wouldn't be so bad if their design seemed to have more structure to it. And to be fair, their earlier levels did. The first level gets you accustomed to shooting, the second level gets you accustomed to the "hidden" keys motif, and the third level gives you practice and perspective on platforming tasks that will pop up later. The early parts of Turok are well done in teaching you the principal challenges you will be overcoming in increasing difficulty over the course of the campaign, but after a few introductory levels, the game seems to focus far more on width than depth. Quake is still praised for its incredible level design, where it could create labyrinthine levels but subtly code the environment to make sure the player was always on top of where they were (this wasn't always the case in Quake as some would have you believe, but it was far more than it wasn't). Turok's later levels have long snaking paths leading to dead ends, or even wrapping back around to where you started. I imagine the reasoning for the complex design was to lengthen gameplay, since going back and looking for missing keys in order to unlock further levels was more than likely to be the case if you were a kid playing this game. Although, if that were true, I'm not sure this game should be designed with a kid in mind.
Turok from the outside looks rather cartoonish, with bright colors and green fauna giving way to grey temples and colorful lasers from alien enemies (yeah, there are aliens in this game - more of them than there are dinosaurs, as a matter of fact). But Turok also boasts a near unprecedented amount of violence for Nintendo's new console. Killing enemies could have them fall backwards, or clutch their throat as blood spouts from the (implied) wound, and an explosive can burst enemies into bits all over the ground. By today's standards it is certainly mild, but for '97 it was incredibly violent. The Playstation was already well into making a reputation for itself as the more adult platform for games, and while Turok certainly doesn't scream adult, it was as violent as anything on Sony's machine. Iguana Entertainment even said they were worried about what Nintendo were going to think, expecting push back and censoring before they went gold, but Nintendo didn't give them much of anything in the way of restraint. So bloody, violent Turok remained.
Turok was a success upon release, and rightly so. The game boasted some of the best shooter mechanics on a console, and the fact it was an original title was already giving credence to the idea of the console shooter being not only feasible, but profitable. Goldeneye would come out in only a few months time and cement that claim, as would a critically acclaimed (and cult favorite) sequel to Turok a year later. The Turok series would unfortunately be short lived, dwindling sales across the four games on Nintendo 64, and failing outright on the PS2 before being remade in 2008 for the 7th generation of consoles and not fairing much better. Turok: Dinosaur Hunter was proof the genre could work on consoles, and is unique in its approach to the FPS by integrating collect-a-thon mechanics into its gameplay. There's a roughness to the game overall that can wear down the player playing today, but its only a slight drag against the current of gun-popping, side-jumping, dino-bloodying fun that Turok has to offer.
7.5
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