Turok 2 was initially released on the Nintendo 64 in 1998, and it could've been a contender. It had enemy scripting and graphics comparable to Half-Life, sprawling levels flush with secrets, a rogue's gallery of half-a-dozen beautifully rendered non-human cultures to slaughter, a far superior arsenal to any first person shooter on the market, a grander scope than most western console roleplaying games of the era, split-screen multiplayer with multiple game modes, a robust cheat engine and options suite, a voluptuous and scantily clad blue woman with a thigh gap, and a shirtless Native American hero tasked with murdering everything in the interdimensional sewer he's sworn to preserve.
It was the greatest first person shooter of its generation by a significant margin, and you know I'm qualified to make that statement because I've lived almost my entire life in first person. It was better than Half-Life, Goldeneye, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Unreal, System Shock 2, Medal of Honor, Chex Quest, or Realms of the Haunting.
It was also impossible to play. The mad taint of Turok 2's dizzying graphical ambitions consigned it to oblivion until Night Dive remade it in 2017 once computing was advanced enough to accommodate the grandeur therein. Before that? Good luck hitting anything. On the N64, Turok 2 had a draw distance shorter than many rooms were large, and it ran at twenty frames per second when nothing was happening on the screen.
There was never nothing happening onscreen. Between the bloom lighting, the high res world assets, the huge scope of everything, the detailed and often animated weapon models, the real time shadows, the complex wiggle worm rigging and high polygon count on every enemy, and the preposterous floods-of-blood death animations resulting from explosions, Turok 2's framerate dipped into the single digits somewhere approaching most of the time. If you had more than one enemy on the screen, the framerate was now your enemy, as well. This was especially true if you used the N64 RAM expansion because it let you set the resolution to a whopping 480i, and of course you did that because you were 8 years old, you wanted the game to look as good as possible, and you probably didn't make the connection between the resolution and the framerate. The RAM expansion, despite living up to its namesake, only compounded the problem, swelling up a game that was already way too big for its breeches.
Now, combine that with the terrible N64 analog stick, lack of dual analog control, look spring by default, and highly mobile enemies that demanded precision aiming, and you've got yourself an exercise in whatever emotion you feel when video game don't work good.
Turok 2 was full of so much stellar material that it didn't work. It was ahead of its time, ahead of its hardware, ahead of its interface, ahead of its scene, ahead of itself, and to play it was forbidden by its very existence. It brought the N64 to its knees, I imagine it brought most 1999 computers to their knees when it got ported to PC, and it took being remade nearly twenty years later for its brilliance to finally be realized. Turok 2 wasn't bad for being unplayable on the N64, no. The N64 was bad for not being able to play Turok 2.
This remaster brings one of the greatest games of the sixth generation into a world that's ready for it. Just turn off the hints if you want to play like you have a brain.
