So here's the story: It is 1886, and you are Tal'Set of the Saquin people. Captain Tobias Bruckner is slaughtering your tribe-members left and right. Tal'Set hunts down Bruckner and a great battle occurs between the two. Shortly after the battle begins, the ground caves in from underneath them. They find themselves in a mysterious underground underground room with all sorts of ancient artifacts and symbols. Dripping blood from one of Tal'Set's wounds triggers some sort of other-worldly reaction and both Bruckner and Tal'Set arrive in the Lost Land. Revived by the strange Seer TarKeen, he is sent on a mission to help the people of the Lost Land battle for their lives against the Evil Lord Tyrannus, leader of the reptilian hordes. Cool story, huh?

G R A P H I C S
Pretty impressive. The best part of the graphics is the speed of the game. I've never experienced slowdown, even when playing multiplayer. This is absolutely a huge plus. Unfortunately, the graphics themselves are a little worse in multiplayer, but it really isn't very noticable. The dinosaur characters in the game look great and are animated really well. The textures of the skin and their clothing are done very well - there are tons of little details - and they look great when they move, with ruffling and rimpling. The humans (pretty much just Tal'Set) don't look to great when moving, but they look alright stationary. Stationary, it's nice, with wrinkles in skin and all those lil' extras. When moving, it just goes to hell. They are blocky and rigid, which doesn't look so great when Tal'Set falls over after dying. It looks like a tree falling down, not a human collapsing. Overall, the graphics of people get the job done, but with a little extra time, probably could've been just a tad bit better. The landscapes look pretty, because most things are rounded, even though there are many textures seen many times. Most of the buildings, for instance, use the same texture for stone, which is sort of unavoidable, I guess, but it would have been nice to see some variations, such as a blotch here or a crack there. The plants are also done well, although they are 2D. The nice thing about them is when you walk near or over one, it sways back and forth, like a real plant would if you passed through it. There are many plants. Sooooooo many plants. It makes for fun gameplay, because you can walk around and just see an item lying behind a bush. You pick it up and go use it and find another! But I'll get into that next.

G A M E P L A Y
The gameplay in this game is absolutely brilliant. As you can see by my side-tracking in the above paragraph, the it is some fun sh!t. Man, it's so fun! Even if you play the same level 4 times, it's never really the same, which makes it easier to try to beat the game - because each time, something is different, something different happens, and the result is different. The levels are incredibly varied, with all sorts of different missions and objectives to keep you occupied. The way the game is set up is in chapters. In each chapter, there are different sections, which are basically just save-points. Each section within a chapter is often related, and you start where you left off in the previous section. The different objectives range from passing through a gate to destroying an airship while flying around on one o' them dinos. There are flying levels and First-Person Shooter levels, both of which are great. One disadvantage (major disadvantage) with this game is the load times. They are incredibly long. To start up one game, you have to wait twice, both for what I'd call a really long time. It would be a good idea to bring a ball to throw against a wall or a Bop-It to play while you're waiting. Other than that, the game is pretty slick, with wonderful-looking menus and a nice in-game interface. The display is done well, with everything you need to see and organized very well. The weapons in Turok are wonderful. They range from a warclub (see below) to the coolest thing ever, a gravity disruptor (see below), which can lift your enemies in the air and toss them about, blast the ones right in front of you quickly out of the way, or blow all the enemies near you away. It's really useful if you need to shove someone down a cliff. The multiplayer in this game - oh man, is it fun. There are tons of different levels, tons of different items, and tons of different weapons. There are all sorts of different things you can do in the multiplayer and it just keeps you coming back for more. You can even snipe people - there's one level that's great for it with two buildings on opposite sides of a canyon-type thing. It, somehow, reminds me of the Halo multiplayer. It really is fun - it rivals multiplayer games like Perfect Dark or GoldenEye. So, as you can see, there's all kinds of fun stuff going on in this game to keep you coming back. You can play this game for a while.

C O N T R O L
Okay, well, this game scored 3 out of 4 right on the target. Sadly, not this section. This section just barely misses that darn target. The control takes a while to master, but once you do, it really makes sense and... well, it's good. See, what is very confusing is that the c-stick is turn and look up/down and the regular stick is mov forward and backward and strafe. Personally, this is out I like games, and that's how I have my Agent Under Fire set up, but there should definitely be a newbie control set-up, or maybe (a more aptly named) "normal" set up. It is very hard to try to explain to other people that play the game how to move the character. They either try to move forward with the c-stick, causing them to look down or up, depending on whether you have "inverted look" on or off, or they try to turn with the regular stick, which causes them to move sideways. After this, it's almost as if they have seizures and they start wildly flinging their character in every direction imaginable. No, it's not a pretty sight. It happens, though, and it's sad. A is jump, which is a good choice, because you need that fairly often. Y and B are switch weapons, X is switch arrows on the bows. Z is zoom in (when availible), R is shoot, and L is crouch. Most of these controls are nice, but the weapons controls often get confusing, because it's hard to remember which is next weapon and which is previous weapon. L is good for crouch because crouch is needed often, when trying to be unnoticed. The control really could have used a customizable option to benefit some players, as well as this section's score. Oh well, next time.

S O U N D
Honestly, this sound is worthy of a movie. It has a very epic tone to it, which fits the game quite nicely. I really enjoyed this music, and it has a lot of variety, although there is a theme running throughout. The sound effects are average, but are still fairly good. The voiceovers are pretty good, as far as voice-overs go, but nothing more special than that. I wish I had more to say, but I don't.

I N - B R I E F
Graphics - 8.8
Gameplay - 9.6
Control - 7.9
Sound - 9.2
Overall - 9.0