- NA release: 10th December 1998
- PAL release: 18th December 1998
- JP release: 18th June 1999
- Developer: Iguana
- Publisher: Acclaim
- N64 Magazine Score: 95%
Turok makes a return, and in this one Iguana seemed to have listened to some complaints of the first one and paid some attention to GoldenEye. Some of these changes work and some don’t. Once again, I’m playing the wonderful remaster from Nightdrive.
The first Turok feels like a first person collect-a-thon platformer. Even through controlling yourself mid-air feels a lot more precise, there are very few platforming segments in the game. The keys that were hidden in tiny nooks and crannies are now mostly on the main path of the level.
The level design is also very different. The first felt much more open, while this feels like a series of overly long corridors, with a few confusing mazes here and there. Large chunks of the level also seem to repeat a lot and every level grows tiresome long before you get to the end of it. Turok 2 really needed shorter levels, but more of them.
The levels do feel far more distinct than the first game, each having their own look and style. They just seem to have been made incredibly long just to pad out the game.
To counter the levels feeling like corridors, you also have objectives (such as rescuing some immensely scary children), which go too far in the other direction. If you reach the end of the level without completing these objectives, you’ll be told you’ve failed and be sent back to the start. Thankfully, your progress is kept.
The first level purposefully sets you up to fail. There are three distress beacons you need to power up with fuel cells. The first will be one of the first things you find in the game, but with no power cell. You’ll find the three power cells you need near the end of the level, right next to the other beacons. Other objectives are also extremely well hidden – more so than the majority of secrets in the game. This would be fine in smaller levels, but incredibly tedious in these levels, especially the ones that are a nightmare to navigate backwards in.
One thing Turok 2 has improved upon is the weapons. They were great in the first game, and even better here. Many are fun to use, including a powerful shotgun that shoots bouncing bullets, and one of the final ones in the game is famous for the spectacle it creates: it homes in on brains and drills into them, causing massive amount of blood. It only works on enemies that have some intelligence, though.
The guns do alleviate the tedium of the levels somewhat, with really good enemy variety throughout the levels – although I wish we had some more dinosaurs. Another notable thing in this game is the lack of human enemies.
Turok 2 is a lot of fun to play, but each level gets dull long before it finishes. There’s even a segment where you get to ride a dinosaur with massive guns and it’s great fun for a bit, but you’re just waiting for it to end half way through. It pads things out a bit too much.
Fun
Nope, the truth is, Turok 2 is exceptional. It’s not just a sequel. It’s a whole new game. We would imagine Iguana have used the basic engine from the first game though, to be honest, they could easily have not. It’s that different and that much better. All the problems of the original have been ironed out meaning it’s certainly not just a lazy sequel – it’s not Tomb Raider 2.
Tim Weaver, N64 Magazine #21
Remake or remaster?
The Nightdrive remaster is a wonderful version of the game.
Official ways to get the game.
The faithful remaster of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is available on GOG, Steam, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation
Europe
Japan
North America
N64 Games by Date
1997: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1998: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1999: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2000: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
I could never play through the game from start to finish in a linear fashion, owing to its somewhat repetitive and sprawling level layouts that end up outstaying their welcome, but I still used to have a blast with this game when jumping around the game with cheats. I suspect that my experience is how most people ended up playing Turok 2 back in the day, because it was also famous for its plethora of cheats that were liberally slathered around gaming magazines of the late 90s.
While I doubt I could stomach playing the whole game from start to finish, the weapons are just so imaginative and fun to use that it’s worth playing the game today just to mess around with them (which no doubt inspired the creation of the multiplayer-only spinoff, Turok Rage Wars). The exploration-focused level design is also pretty unique within the genre and, while not as platforming heavy as the first Turok, the levels are pretty fun to jump and run around in.
This game was a big step up from the original game in terms of tech, level design and presentation, and I do think it’s the better game. It’s pretty remarkable how much they managed to get out of the console in just a short 1.5 year dev cycle, and this is also the apex of the classic Turok series as we knew it.
Turns out that there’s a reason for that, and it’s because this was the last game that the Iguana Entertainment that we knew ended up producing for Acclaim… because Iguana’s founder had just left the company and founded a little known developer called Retro Studios just two months prior to the release of Turok 2, on September 28th 1998. Shortly after Turok 2’s release, this game’s development team by and large upped and left to join Spangenburg’s new Texan venture; and while not everyone ended up sticking around for the entirety of Metroid Prime’s development cycle, the lineage of Turok 1 – Turok 2 – Metroid Prime is pretty obvious when you play the three games back to back.
Turok 1 & 2 were big wins for NOA, and were probably the two most successful games to come out of their whole Dream Team initiative for the N64. It’s not hard to see why they would’ve been willing to fund Spangenburg’s new Texan venture; though ironically, his own venture at the company wouldn’t last long, and after a wild period of mismanagement at his own hand, Spangenburg would end up getting outsted from his own company in the year 2000, as Nintendo would end up taking over the company fully and completely changing the way the development studio functioned (including ousting many of its staff who did work on Turok 1 & 2). But either way, you do indeed have Turok 1 & 2 to thank for the Metroid Prime series being made. Not only did they directly lead to the founding of Retro Studios, but the development experience gained on those two titles directly fed into the game design of Metroid Prime itself.