Will the bulletting of my beloved dinosaurs never cease? Turok: Origins will revisit the dino-hunting archery of ye olde Nintendo 64, reimagining it as a story of three native huntsfolk out to lambast large lizards. The big new angle is that it’ll be a third-person shooter and you can play in online co-op as a team of T-rex wreckers. You then slurp up their dino DNA to upgrade your character. Come and watch these crimes against nature in the trailer below.
There’ll be a lot of melee attacking by the looks of things, but a shootybang is a shootybang. Players are promised “plasma rifles, ray guns, snipers, bows, shotguns, and more” , while the DNA powers will supplement that combat (one power looks like a time-freezing bubble). There’s also a story to follow, somewhere, but we’re not told what it’s about yet. Only that it is “epic” and will see the warriors visit lots of fancy locations “from ancient temples and wasteland canyons to dense jungles”.
This isn’t the first time the series has been revived. A reboot simply titled Turok came out in 2008 to mixed reviews. It sold well enough for developers at Propaganda Games to start work on a sequel, but not well enough to prevent its sequel being cancelled the following year, resulting in 70 redundancies at the studio. How times change, eh? We’d never see ruthless layoffs like that today!
Anyway. It’s being made by Saber Interactive, the many-studio’d publishers who specialise in working on licensed properties, and a relatively safe pair of hands. They did Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, World War Z, Evil Dead: The Game, among others. Saber are also working on another dinosaur game, Jurassic Park: Survival, which looks less violent toward the beautiful creatures and therefore morally more forgivable.
If I am cranky about the jungly shooter, please forgive me. It was shown off at The Game Awards, which aired in the early hours of this morning and has claimed all my Rock Paper Brethren, leaving only two survivors: me and guides guru Jeremy. The team was up posting much of the news, and before Ollie expired from a chronic case of video games, he wrote up a huge summary post of all the games revealed at the Game Awards 2024. That’s massively handy, that.