Turok demo(lished).

I got my hands on the Turok demo from XBL. Finally, someone came to their senses and decided to let people actually download it, so you don’t have to preorder it so you can get a T-shirt and a demo disc just to call your pre-order off half an hour later because it turns out it’s not a good game.
You start off without any introduction at all in some dark caves, somewhere, with someone talking to you telling you to do something. I haven’t been that confused since watching The Fight Club from the middle while listening to Ask-a-Ninja podcast at the same time. I can tell you it’s one of the worst demo beginnings I’ve seen. I mean come on! The demo weights 1,2 GB and they didn’t even start it with a cut-scene?

Note to developers:
You guys want to sell your product this way? Nice one. Oh, and while we're on the subject - why does the demo weight 1,2BG? You can finish the damn thing in 10 minutes for the love of God.

The game is build on the Unreal Engine but to be honest it looks more like it was build on the second not the third one. The caves are dark, the light sourcing is very basic and all the textures look exactly the same. The Unreal Engine is know for it’s great wet surfaces, but the developers managed to screw that up as well. Now wet surfaces look like there are covered in Turok’s boogers that he just leaves around because he has sinusitis. The one good thing about the graphics would be the dinosaurs. They are well modeled and their skin textures are sharp and, well, reptile-ish (?) – the dinosaurs really look believable… unless they move. They tend to “bend” in very strange ways making them look like carnival balloons that are not inflated enough. They also have a tendency to run in circles for no apparent reason and get shot in the ass… I mean tail. And when they do get shot, ragdoll hell breaks loose. I think that those dinos have the worse ragdoll physics since the whole thing was invented. Kill one and you’ll see them flinch, spasm, convulse, twitch, jerk . It’s like they are subjected to a heavy dosage of electric current right after they die. It’s more grotesque than KISS, Brain Dead shown to small children, even Bush talking about Eastern European countries for God’s sake. Eventually, after they stop moving they will end up in poses that could only inspire Francis Bacon to rise from the dead and paint a picture.

Ok, let’s say that you get out of the caves. You’ll end up in a jungle that looks much better than the caves… which doesn’t mean that it looks particularly good. It was obviously made from LEGO blocks since everything looks kind of the same. All trees and rocks seem to be sharing one texture which started out as a green-grey picture made by a 4-year-old who drew his dog puking. The fairly dense foliage is a nice touch, but again the models look like they were taken from Pirate Island LEGO kit.

The combat is pretty much generic with some pointless QTEs added (which only make sense if you have your knife equipped).[EDIT: Ok, I made a mistake. Actually you don't need the knife equipped to stab the dinos during QTEs, but the animation is random and more often than not you'll just push the reptile away without making any damage. My appologies. The game sucks anyway.] One thing that’s particularly annoying is the fact that the dinosaurs will constantly knock you over which has only one animation associated with it, which gets boring after the second time. The only good aspect of the combat seems to be the stealth knife kills which have nice animations and are really easy to execute since the human enemies seem to be deaf and blind. You can also use stealth against animal adversaries but I couldn't be bothered to try it. When you get a shotgun you can use it’s alternative fire to shoot out flares that will attract the dinosaurs for a few seconds (as far as I know fire and bright lights make animals run in panic, but I guess the developers know better and Discovery Channel lies).
I love the objective system. Let me give you an example. You are told that you must follow the smoke on the horizon… which considering the tall trees and the fact that it’s only slightly darker than the clouds makes this a pretty hard job. I bet there will also be objectives like “kill the dinosaur” or “eat some grass” in the full game. Other complains would include controls (with strangely mapped buttons, no flashlight and no melee attack if you don’t have you’re knife equipped), voice acting and weapon sounds.

I think they should have just made an XBL Arcade version of the second Turok as that was the last good game in the series. I think this game will end up like Area 51 that wanted to be a great game and ended up as a shelf stuffer.

By the way, the game developer – Propaganda Games – has a blog on IGN. You can read it here, then download the demo and see how they lied.