Turok Review

Costas Stephanides’s Review

Turok is one tough cookie

From humble beginnings in the land of comics, Turok comes to mobile thanks to Living Mobile and coincidentally arrives on the PS3 and XBox360. While a java mobile game cannot compete graphically with a FPS on the latest generation consoles (no longer next gen imho) but Living Mobile have tried to emulate the intensity present on the consoles in this horizontally scrolling java game.

If by intensity, they mean difficulty, they have succeeded. Turok Mobile is tough and be prepared for restarts. To be fair, not many casual gamers are probably going to plumb for Turok when browsing for a mobile game. Hardcore gamers like hard games and this should keep them sweet for a while.

Taking its cue from Metal Gear, Turok provides a mix of silent stealth kills with unabated machine gun madness. The concept is great and you have the ability to stop and blend into any surrounding just by pressing 8 - no need to find the shadows here. Once the enemy has past, press 5 and choke them before doing unpleasant things involving your knife and their throat and you can expect lots of messiness (depending on your countries game violence policy - killjoys). Along the way a machine gun, shotgun and bow can be found and upgraded.

Fans of Turok will know that dinosaurs play a major part in the story and you can even try a few stealth kills on the small ones.

There's a bundle of levels and achievements to aim for and even an occassional mini game melee but unfortunately the controls let the game down a little. You are free to roam across the entire level but every time you switch direction, the camera pans forward a little bit and there is a loss of momentum and fluidity to the gameplay. Turok can jump, climb, hang and drop off platforms; all this is achieved without pressing down. To hang off a platform, simply press left or right and Turok will walk to the edge and automatically lower himself. The temptation to press down while he's standing up will only make him step into the shadows. The game has peculiar controls that will take some getting used to.

Most of the enemies are fairly dumb and follow a specific path and it's not too hard to get rid of these guys. There are, however, a couple of heavily armoured agents who require a bit more thought in their dispatch as only stealth kills are going to do the job. Likewise, the dinosaurs are fairly easy apart from the T-Rex. In fact, the only way we managed to defeat him was through an apparent bug where you can stand just far enough away from his snapping head to shoot without forcing him to chase you. We're currently stuck on level 10 and have no idea how you can defeat the hidden ninja.

As mobile games go, this is one of the hardest we've played in a long time. That being said, the format and pace of the game does give you the opportunity to carefully plot your course through the levels.