1/12/2013 Why do I keep picking up grenades I can't throw? This bothers me. Turok is still kinda fun to play, at least for a little while. My interest wains so quickly at least in part because there's no story, literally none, the first level starts: "Locate the hub ruins, use the keys", well shit, keys for what? Why? I thought I was a dinosaur hunter... All the exposition must have been relegated to the manual, this is not an inspiring start (Even Super Mario managed to do slightly more). Turok is a bit of a throwback to another era of gaming, N64 compared to it Doom, and there's a lot in common, collect keys to advance, guns and ammo will be hidden out in the open, floating in the air, collect triangles to gain extra lives, pluses to gain health (or sometimes different coloured triangles)... it's no longer really compelling gameplay in the age of Call of Duty XYZ and its ilk. Oh and of course there's the jumping, it would be a bit criminal to not mention the jumping. Turok has two challanges to stop you simply walking through the game: Bad guys you must shoot, and platforms you must jump between. The shooting bit is alright, I'm genuinely impressed by some of the enemy animation in the game, from gurgling deaths with spurting blood to the way humanoid characters lean into turns or skid to a stop to reverse direction - it's rather well done. But the jumping is tedious at best, and often frustrating, you can make it a lot easier by turning on the map (with L) but it's pretty poor gameplay. The music starts out enjoyable, but it's quite repeditive and (happily) pretty easy to tune out, so it's got that going for it. On the brighter side, although I may have been hallucinating it, when I entered a cave on the first level I could swear the sounds were all altered to reflect the enclosed environment, which is a very nice touch (if it really happened). I want to like Turok, the first few minutes were actually fun, but the initial glow of shooting things with arrows wore off and I ended up running around, with no idea whether I was lost or actually advancing (not lost as it turned out), all the walls made of the same rocks, the same enemies running out of the mist at me, and always picking up stupid flippin' grenades that I cannot throw.