Turok: Dinosaur Hunter [N64 & PC]

Turok is based on the comic of the same name, but from what I've read, both take place in different timelines; in the game here, Tal'Set whom has taken the role of Turok, protects the barrier between Earth and, where the events of the game take place, the Lost Lands, a place where time has no meaning and where a wide variety of creatures end up in.  The Campaigner has sent his troops around the Lost Lands to find the 8 pieces of the Chronoscepter, a cataclysmic weapon, to break the previously mentionned barrier and rule the universe, thus Turok sets off to defeat him and his goons along the way.  While the story isn't heavily inspired, I always liked the idea of vastly different creatures that hardly have any connections between themselves safe from a common cause, killing you, it kind of feels like there's a sense of a community amongst the enemies.

Turok is an FPS set in an open world of sorts; the game is divided into 8 worlds, and safe from the final hideout, you'll be collecting keys to unlock the next levels.  The game heavily encourages exploration to retrieve the keys, but also to find many goodies such as Ultra Healths and ammo, all while mowing through the many enemy hordes.  It's similar to Metroid Prime in that sense, which isn't a farfetched comparison since Iguana Entertainment and Retro Studios were founded by the same person, although, as a way to support my claims, I'd say that Turok does many things better than Metroid.

First up, the environments are huge and mostly open, which can lead to very interesting encounters, for example in the Ancient City, you could be fighting dudes at ground level around buildings, who are running towards you with their spears or blowguns, while others are firing you with their plasma rifles atop the roofs, things can get pretty tense when the game has the chance.  The vast levels also has many corners where special ammo and precious health pickups reside in, which is also a huge appeal of the level design.

You'll also be blowing apart dinosaurs, giant insects, magicians, and aliens with a vast array of primitve and futuristic weapons, such as an assault rifle, a bow, a rocket launcher, an automatic shotgun, and even more.  With a huge selection of weapons like this, it helps keep the action going; use the assault rifle to shoot the humanoids, then switch to the shotgun for the dinosaurs coming a bit too close, and then finish off the gorilla-like Pur-Lin with Tek Arrows or, even better, the one-hit kill arrows trick.

So because the environments are very open, and you'll be constantly switching weapons, Turok is incredibly fluid and rarely ever slows down to a crawl, compared to the likes of Metroid Prime, the latter heavily divided into smaller rooms.  Its other strength is that, while Turok wasn't maybe the only open world FPS, adventure game, many other games of the genre at the time were more geared towards finishing individual levels.

The jungle motif, albeit it doesn't lead to a lot of thematic variety, makes Turok distinct from other, more modern/futuristic shooters like Quake and Doom.  This is also further supported by the soundtrack mostly made of tribal drums, with the occasional electric guitars, further immersing you into this jungle filled with weird creatures.

Turok has several strengths, but it isn't devoid of issues.  I've been basing my points mostly from the most recent PC version, the Steam one, but since the game was originally made with the Nintendo 64 in mind, the open environments I've described above can be sometimes quite empty, even the Ancient City has a lot of flat, empty spaces, plus the game isn't really all that difficult, so there's still some room to cover.

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter is still hella fun though, again its very fluid gameplay makes it fun to run through, and there are hardly any boring moments, safe from maybe the times you have to go back through a level to find a key you missed in your first runthrough.

My other point now is: What if we borrow this concept, and modernize it?

Imagine, I'm also a fan of the Serious Sam series, which is a series of very frantic shooters, so what if we would combine the frantic gameplay of Serious Sam, and put it in an open world, adventure game?  I really wish there would be more shooters using the same concepts as Turok, and so this is why I see this game in such high regards, it does things differently from most FPS games, even from those of today.