Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie
Developer: Pillow Pig Games
Publisher: Universal Studios Interactive Entertainment LLC
Platform: PC (Steam)
Release Date: Jul 25, 2019
Price: $14.99
Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is a game that I can’t think many people asked for or expected. The Turok series, going all the way back to the comic books, has always been infused with a very adult sensibility. You fight dinosaurs, battle aliens, monsters, and generally cause all manner of mayhem in an attempt to save the universe. But for most people, Turok means the Nintendo 64 and it’s chunky graphics and exceeding amounts of blood and gore; for the time at least.
Now we quietly get the release of a new Turok game that is so radically different from everything that came before, I found it hard to even call it a Turok game outside of its given name. Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is an isometric affair developed by Pillow Pig Games. You take on the role of the titular dinosaur hunter and alongside your companion, work to escape the titular Lost Valley.
It’s a simple enough concept and more than enough to build a Turok game around, but some strange choices in design, gameplay, and combat make this one too weird to recommend to fans of the series. While Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is a traditional action game with a linear design, it never really screams Turok. One could easily stick any character into the lead role and you wouldn’t even have to change anything about the game. This is a straightforward action game that has you knifing and arrowing in all manner of beast on your journey.
Graphically Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is gorgeous. But it’s these graphics that set the game a little too far outside the spectrum of Turok. The graphics are adorable in that mobile game aesthetic more calling to mind Disney Tsum-Tsum and not a bloody murder machine. I love looking at Turok and company, but I find it hard to buy into the cute dinosaur hunter. If you are new to the series then this isn’t going to be an issue, but if you have been with the series before you are going to be fighting yourself to adjust to the new visual style.
That said, there are a ton of animations that hype up this new cute look and feel. Enemy design is adorable and their animations are all pretty charming. Animals pounce at you in a comical manner, enemies smash into walls like a Saturday morning cartoon, and Turok and company run around like a couple of kids toys dealing with puzzles. Add into the mix the beautifully drawn environments and Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is a really pretty game to look at. Playing it is another thing entirely though.
This is the sort of game that looks amazing in videos and when you watch someone play, but once you start playing yourself you quickly find that the visual charm might only be there to hide the lacking gameplay mechanics. Turok is limited in his abilities on his adventure to leave the Lost Valley. You have your knife and your bow-and-arrow to tackle the enemies that stand in your way. But it’s the combat mechanics where the game screws the dinosaur in a frustrating way.
Combat is something this sort of game lives and dies on, and Turok, for being this legendary character that hunts dinosaurs (Turok Dinosaur Hunter is his most famed moniker after all) he sure plays like someone with little knowledge of how to fight, let alone use a knife. The game kicks off with a little tutorial that fills you in on all the skills you need and it’s here where most players will begin to see the cracks in the armor.
Animations are beautiful as I mention above, but it’s these animations that hold back the combat. Your knifing animation is slick and smooth but is far too long to be very effective, even slower when using the charge that I tended to ignore. You swing slowly and will often miss enemies which turns battles into these wars of attrition. You have so much time during an attack that you are forced to think of what to do next while still in motion.
Do you try to attack the enemy again, do you dodge and roll out of the way because you might whiff your attack, or do just acknowledge that you are going to be wrecked by the game’s bosses which feel almost impossible even on the easy setting the game affords you. I thought it might have just been me and that I needed to “git gud” but the internet is full of players who couldn’t even get past the first boss in the game on anything other than easy, and even then it took several tries. Could this possibly be the cutest Souls-like game ever created? Maybe, but that’s not why Turok fans came for.
A lot of the problems come from the isometric style employed. Everything is laid out in this really neat and aesthetically pleasing way but the game never really uses it. You aren’t locked onto the grid the design uses and can move about freely. This wouldn’t be so bad but it means that positioning yourself against the enemies that do seem to be stuck onto the grid is very hit or miss. It’s like two different gameplay styles working together in a less than stellar manner. And when boss battles require precision it becomes a real detriment. This really sucks as the boss battles can be a lot of fun on paper.
What’s worse is that your combat is generally tied to the grid so you’ll only be able to attack in this locked off manner. This means that enemies will oftentimes be out of position, or in such a sport where you won’t be able to tag them with arrows from a distance. The game also uses push-back so there were several instances where I pushed an enemy out of position to my detriment and their benefit. The worst of this comes when you run into damage from environmental barriers that you can’t avoid because of push-back to forced forward motion from your strikes. And this damage won’t affect the enemies at all.
Turok: Escape from Lost Valley is a wicked hard game, but not from design as in a Souls game, but instead from lacking and janky combat mechanics. You are going to die a whole lot and probably won’t ever really understand why. Right from your first mini-boss, you’ll be at a severe disadvantage and the game just doesn’t ramp up the difficulty as you play and learn. Combat is too difficult for its own good and for no obvious reason.
There’s also a lack of impact from the sound department. I’m a sucker for music and sound and know how much it impacts a game and what it can do to draw a player into the world you are pushing. So, it’s a shame that the sound is on the low end of the totem pole. Attacks lack punch, music is basic and repetitive outside a couple of fun tracks, and environmental sounds are really weak and almost laughable.
The team had a really great visual look and tossed in the most work there, but with that comes the issue that everything else just isn’t up to snuff just yet. The challenge a game throws at you should come from good design and unique ideas. You should want to play again because you can figure out what you did wrong. The challenge should not come from poor combat that only leads to frustration. Still, I need to commend the fact that this game even exists.
You see, Turok: Escape from Lost Valley came out of nowhere because it was the result of a contest held by Universal Studios that let the winning team create a video game based on an IP that the studio held. And so the small two-man team brought back Turok for another go around in the video game space; something really commendable with what they could have selected.
While Turok: Escape from Lost Valley isn’t a great game it does have an undeniable charm and could potentially become something special with a few updates to fix the difficulty and adjust the combat. And while I can’t recommend the game, I do hope that it does well enough to allow a full Turok experience to see the light of day on next-generation consoles.
“Turok: Escape from Lost Valley lacks the spirit of the Turok series but it’s the limited and janky combat that truly hold it back”
Final Score 2.5/5
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