Well, last week the Turok Demo came out, and I’ve finally had a chance to play it. Turok is about a ship of humans that crash lands on an alien planet infested with dinosaurs. They, of course, are being followed by other people who want to kill them for whatever reason. You have to fend off the dinos while attacking the other humans. The demo is short, so there really isn’t too much backstory.

Moving on to the gameplay, Turok is run off of the Unreal Engine, and its graphics are reminiscent of Gears of War, as is the feel of the weapons. In the demo, you basically have a knife and a bow for silent kills from different ranges, a dual-wield able submachine gun, a dual-wield able shotgun with a flare launcher to distract the dinos, and a more powerful weapon that is really hard to use and not worth it in that particular level. One can kill the dinosaurs in any manner, but shotguns seem to work best unless you’re trying for a stealth kill, in which case a bow is almost necessary.

You start off the demo in the caves, where you must find a way out while killing raptors. After finding out that the dinos just love to headbutt me off of cliffs, erasing minutes of climbing over and over again, I got pretty pissed and started to snipe with the bow. After finally getting out of the caves, the game has you run about for a bit looking for your crash site. In the jungle, you are reunited with your friend with the sniper rifle, who makes it really easy. After discovering that the AI of the dinosaurs is better than you had previously thought, you can now shoot them with flares and watch them get mauled by other dinos. It would have been nice to know that earlier though.

The developers of the game seem to forget that humans bleed as well as dinos. Shoot a raptor with a shotgun and it will fall in a pile of its own blood, twitching. Shoot a human, and there isn’t even an ounce to speak of. Even when using a knife, it only makes a scraping sound(on top of the awesome stealth kill animation.) One of the tips in the game actually calls the dino knife kills a “meat fountain.”

Overall, Turok was an awesome demo to try out, and I’m sure that the game will obviously be better than this. For 360 owners, this demo is a must download; and I’m going to pre-order my copy soon.

In other news, The Devil May Cry 4 demo is awesome but short, and Bungie finally made Big Team Battle a ranked playlist.