You know how some game franchises get better with age, like a fine wine, while others rot and stagnate? Well, the Turok series is a good example of the latter case. It started as a fairly groundbreaking FPS on the N64, and pushed the graphical and gameplay boundaries of the console with its sequels. The series started to lose steam, however, and eventually petered out in the rather mediocre Turok Evolution. Its parent company, Acclaim, made some poor decisions (some involving a really bad BMX game) and went bankrupt in 2004. Disney of all companies purchased the Turok license, and under the Touchstone name, had developer Propaganda Games build a new game. So, did the series’ long and tortured rebirth prove worthwhile? Well, it depends on how strict your definition of Turok is.

The newest Turok is a franchise reboot in every sense of the term, right down to its simple, straightforward title (kind of like “Rocky Balboa,” “Rambo,” and that new “Star Trek” thing). The old continuity, about the time-traveling Tal’set, is nowhere to be seen. The new hero is Joseph Turok, a distant descendant of Tal’set, who is on a mission to find and kill his old commander, Kane. Kane has gone rogue and has set up camp on a distant planet, and Turok is advisor to a marine strike team sent to end Kane’s plans. Minutes after the marines thaw out of cryo-sleep and gear up, their ship is attacked from orbit and crash-lands on the planet below. This opening sequence sets up Turok’s basic abilities, like climbing, dodging, and prying doors.

The intro also establishes just how pretty the game is, pretty in a drab gray, muscle-bound and dented metal sort of way. The characters are clearly the star of the game’s graphical buffet, featuring some of the best modeling, texturing and animation on the 360 to date. Turok is rendered on Epic’s Unreal 3 engine, and as far as character models go, Propaganda’s effort rivals Epic’s own Gears of War. I actually prefer the visual style of Turok and his sullen marine allies to the improbably bulky Marcus Fenix and crew; Turok’s characters just looked a little more believable.

Gears does have Turok beat on environmental design, if only by a bit. The jungle planet that Turok crashes on is breathtaking from a distance, easily as good looking as Halo 3’s opening level. Once you get closer, the flaws start to appear. A few of the textures aren’t as high res as they should be. Turok also expresses one of the Unreal 3 engine’s technical issues: environments will be rendered with very ugly low res texturing for a few seconds, and then once the memory catches up, resolution will increase dramatically. This happened to me on more than one occasion, but it was only a minor problem, and not nearly as prevalent as it was in Bioshock. The levels themselves are suitably attractive jungle and cave settings, aside from the occasional military base, which are dull and boring in comparison to the organic jungle.



Then again, the jungles have Turok’s signature dinosaurs to liven them up. Propaganda made the Turok series’ unifying thread a pervasive element in the new game, and graphically, they did a great job of it too. Each of the different species—T Rex, raptors, dilophosaurs—is modeled, normal mapped and animated beautifully. Some of them even use group tactics, particularly the raptors. The dinos look so cool and move so realistically, you almost feel bad strangling them and driving a knife through their scaly noggins. Almost. My only complaint is the lack of variety; there are plenty of carnivores vying to feast on your flesh, but the developers excluded the equally cool (and dan...