Turok’s heyday as a first person shooter franchise came and went in what feels like a blink of Mario’s eye. Bursting onto the N64 to pioneer the first person shooter on console, half a year before GoldenEye, and being an FPS mainstay over the following years. But Turok’s time-travelling, dino-blasting adventures lost their lustre when trying to jump to later generations, and it’s now been some 17 years since the last attempt. Saber are no strangers to a licensed franchise reboot, though, and are hoping to weave the same magic that they did for Space Marine 2 for Turok: Origins.
The Turok world has existed since the 1950, going through multiple iterations as the variously named Turok characters – is it their actual name, or an honorific? – gradually come to battle dinosaurs across time and space. Turok: Origins reimagines this once again, with the team at Saber stating right up front that they’ve engaged with the Native American community to ensure that the way that their culture is represented is respectful. Of course, this is still a comic book-inspired sci-fi action romp with squads of soldiers from the Order of Turok being a bit like a planet-hopping Native American Delta Force.
Oh, right. Turok: Origins is now all about co-op play instead of a sole hero, with up to three players diving in to take the fight to the reptillians and Xenia, able to lean into different weapon loadouts and character builds to compliment one another. It’s also both a first person and a third person shooter, letting you switch back and forth with a long button press, right in the middle of the action.
For our hands on, we jumped through a handful of different scenarios, getting to see the different aspects of co-op shooter that Turok: Origins provides.
It started with a trek through a reptile-filled maze of a swamp, looking to battle through these basic enemies to reach power nodes and gain access to the next area. While we navigated the lower pathways of this area, various reptilian enemies would come at us, often shooting lasers from the tops of ridge-lines, or dropping down from them to close the gaps.
Before heading into the fray, we’d had the choice of three biomorphic Mantle suits and prepared weapon and ability loadouts. Raven came with a high-tech bow and arrow, rifle with bouncing projectiles and rocket launcher, while Bison’s shotgun made them great for closer range, combined with a pulse rifle and minigun for laying down damage. I also rather enjoyed Cougar, though, coming with an automatic crossbow and something called a Cerebral Bore to home in and explode the heads of enemies. All of these weapons had alternate fire modes, some lifted directly from previous games and some new creations.
While we didn’t really have time to fully explore each of the abilities granted to us, there’s a progression system for all aspects of your loadout, from the weapons to the abilities and the Mantle itself, which is a conduit for unlocking an animalistic primal energy within you. Through gathering the echoes from fallen enemies and plants in the environment, you can unlock the ability to use in combat. It’s something that can build up quite quickly as well, encouraging you to quickly use the powers as soon as they charge up and deal as much damage as possible.
That became more important as we made our way through each successive demo area. From the first labyrinthine area, we jumped to a facility of the Xenia forces, with a bony alien look to it as we progressed deeper and fought through now humanoid Xenia aliens. This area gave us a first use of the grapple hook, enhancing movement with grapple points to let us get up to higher platforms and navigate multi-layered areas.
Jumping ahead once again, and the hunt for a superweapon to turn the tide of war took us to an ancient temple biome, descending into darkness with more of a platforming angle, though with some fights against Xenia lieutenants and a variety of other enemies to keep things mixed up. The real treat, though, was the battle against a giant cybernetically enhanced triceratops. This towering beast could blast energy from its electrically charged horns, unleashed bullet hell barriers of energy to avoid, and could even teleport around before reappearing and rampaging through the arena.
All I’ll say is that it was actually quite handy that the Gamescom demo seemed to have deaths disabled, or I would have been downed half a dozen times during the tougher segments of this demo.
As a first taster of this game, I’m certainly intrigued and curious to see more of how Saber is reimagining and rebooting this franchise. Thirty minutes was not really long enough to dig deep into the various gameplay mechanics, the co-op and to appreciate the differences between a bunch of different loadouts, but there’s clearly a lot of variety baked into the new narrative, good touches like the 1st and 3rd person toggle, and bombastic dinosaur battling. There’s still a fondness for Turok from the N64’s heyday, and a new beginning could certainly bring this series back to the forefront.
