Turok Demo (PS3) – First Impressions

Well this was a disappointment. After a 6 year break since Turok: Evolution and 11 years since Turok – Dinosaur Hunter originally came out on the Nintendo 64, you’d think the developers could have come up with something better than this.

Maybe the rest of the game will turn out to be more fun than this demo, otherwise I’m not coming back. This demo was boring, linear, repetitive and heavily scripted. To start off you find yourself in a (very) dark cave in which you come across various Velociraptors, although they could have been pretty much anything. In fact, I couldn’t see a bloody thing even on a 40 inch HDTV*. What’s with the dark graphics? It’s not as if they look that good either. Not impressed.

When you finally get outside (no thanks to your useless team member) the massive open environments I was hoping for just failed to appear. Instead I found myself wandering through a claustrophobic (i.e. very intrusive foliage, means you can’t see very much) jungle area. Walk from point A to point B whilst being attacked at set points by dinosaurs (and I mean at set points, as I repeated certain bits to test this). During some of the set attacks you have to hit L2 and or R2 to fend of toothy dinosaur death. This became tiresome very quickly as it occurs quite a lot.

I expected the Turok demo to show off lots of pretty graphics, sound and big scary dinosaurs. But it didn’t and it wasn’t much fun to play either. Is this another Turok – Evolution (which was terrible)?

*The pitch blackness seems to be a feature of the PS3 version. On the Xbox 360 you can actually see where you going in the caves. There isn’t a gamma setting available on the demo, so it’s not that. Weird. Now if I had a choice, I plump for the Xbox 360 version.

Did anyone else like this Turok demo or notice the difference between the 2 versions (PS3 and Xbox 360)?

Update 21st Jan 08: This Turok demo surfaces on the UK PSN store on the 7th Feb 08. But I wouldn’t bother if I were you.

Turok is released on the 8th Feb 2008 on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC (spring 2008).

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