Review: Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion (2023)

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion was a pretty weird game when it came out in 2000, and it’s an equally strange pick for a remaster. But it had to be done. Nightdive knew this. They knew that the N64 trilogy (if you exclude the multiplayer-focused Turok: Rage Wars) had to be completed.

It couldn’t have been an easy task. While Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil had PC versions they could pluck from, Turok 3 remained exclusive to the N64. Thankfully, Nightdive’s wizardry has only become more potent over the years, and because of their work porting other N64 games like Doom 64 and Quake 2 (64) to their proprietary KEX Engine, they were able to reverse engineer Turok 3 to save it from the suffocating tomb of the console that birthed it.

Still, it’s a damned weird game.

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion (PC [Review], Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Nightdive Studios, Iguana Entertainment
Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Released: November 30, 2023
MSRP: $29.99

Part of what makes Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion so strange is that it’s unfortunately very normal. The first two Turok games were practically their own flavor of first-person shooters. The genre was still in its toddler stage, so the rules weren’t quite yet written. The levels were sprawling and confusing, and while it had a similar formula to the spawns of Wolfenstein 3D, they were anarchic mish-mashes. The punks of the burgeoning FPS genre.

It helped that the people behind Iguana Entertainment were rather adept with the N64’s notoriously difficult hardware. Each of their games has interesting technical flourishes, with Turok 2: Seeds of Evil sometimes being referred to as the best-looking game on the console (at the price of draw distance and framerate). Though they had been transitioned to the more dull corporate moniker of Acclaim Studios Austin, that technical trickery is still present in Turok 3.

However, that punk approach to the FPS formula was completely lost. In 1998, Half-Life rewrote the FPS playbooks, and developers were abandoning Wolfenstein 3D’s key-hunt approach. In its place were much more linear experiences that allowed easier storytelling. Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion wants to be Half-Life so hard you can see the vein bulging from its forehead.

The game kicks off with a rather elaborate cutscene showing the previous Turok, Joshua Fireseed, being killed and passing the mantle on to his siblings, Danielle and Joseph. They’re tasked with defeating Oblivion, which is maybe some malevolent force of evil, but it might also be some sort of alien army. The story stops making sense really quickly. Maybe you need to read the comic books.

While previous Turok games were set exclusively in the Lost Lands, a place where time has no meaning, Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion starts off on Earth. I think. Also, it’s the future, maybe.

You get the choice to play as either Danielle or Joseph, and while the bulk of the game remains the same regardless of the choice you make, their paths diverge in some places to focus on different gameplay. Danielle has a grappling hook, while Joseph is 15 and still hasn’t hit puberty, so he can fit through small paces. Their weapons also vary in some places. It’s not much, but it does make further playthroughs more worthwhile.

But while the first two Turok titles were fast-paced affairs where you blew away hordes of enemies, Turok 3 slows things down so it can tell you a hilariously awful story. The first whiff of Half-Life you get is running into a guy who shows you the way down a completely linear corridor, climbs up a ladder, and gets eaten. The next level is set in some sort of military research facility where the still living scientists opine that all their research is ruined and their colleagues are dead. The second stage is Black Mesa, is what I’m saying. Even the soldier dudes move in similar ways to the Marines in Half-Life.

But it’s the shooting that suffers the most. Rather than constantly swimming upstream against hordes of foes and running at about 50mph, they’re much more sparsely scattered about. They die very easily, perhaps to make up for the inaccuracy of the N64 controller, so you wind up spending a lot of time exploring empty environments. Also, neither Danielle nor Joseph can reach the speeds of Tal’Set’s amazing stride.

It at least stops being a direct attempt at copying Half-Life after the second level. There’s even a section pulled from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter that you walk through as if to say, “Look at how much more lifeless our levels have become after just three years!”

At least the weapons are still as varied and exotic as they’ve ever been. The celebrated cerebral bore is back, and in the later levels, you’re always tripping over ammo for it. It’s a fire-and-forget sort of weapon that launches a drone that drills into the heads of your foes before detonating. It’s injury and insult in one package, a very video game weapon.

I mean, really, I got by with the pistol, rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher, and cerebral bore combination, but that small selection of useful weapons is still more impressive than most. 

If there’s one place Turok 3 improved it’s with storytelling. The characters are lip-synced and have legible facial expressions, which was impressive to see on the N64. However, their faces also sometimes contort in disturbing ways, which hasn’t been helped by the polishing strokes that Nightdive made to their models.

But the story. Gosh, the story. I don’t even know where to begin with it. The bizarre revelation and cliffhanger right at the end is especially going to live with me for a while.

Say what you will about Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion in its original state, Nightdive did right by it. They had to reverse-engineer it by pulling it from its cartridge and extracting everything from the compiled program. Then, they rebuilt it in the KEX Engine. While they were at it, everything got touched up. This went beyond simply improving the models without altering the visual style like they did with the Quake remasters. They also improved the resolution of all the textures.

I’m impressed. I asked Nightdive how they managed to improve the resolution of the textures, as they were no doubt heavily compressed for the N64. “No AI,” I was told. “Artists.” The team found the original source for the textures wherever they could. However, even then, they touched some up by hand and recreated ones that they couldn’t find.

Turok 3 doesn’t exactly look new. Not at all. Not even slightly. But it looks less like a ported N64 game and more like a remastered PC game from the early 2000’s. You wouldn’t guess that Nightdive didn’t have access to the source files.

Well, except for the voices. Geez, you can still hear the N64 muffle all over them. Well, except for the opening porch scene.

Some cut content has also been restored, and Nightdive also added environmental props to try and make things seem less lifeless, but they really didn’t jump out at me. Probably a good thing.

As much as I’ll always give Turok 3 flak for its eagerness to follow in Half-Life’s shoes, I find a lot of charm in its ineptitude. It was also the only game in the series that I completed in my youth without using cheats. That’s maybe because it’s less than five hours long and could be completed in a rental period, but still, I’ve never hated it.

It’s just amusing to see such a loving remaster of a game that is mediocre in the most charitable of terms. With the attention Nightdive has given it, you would swear it was a classic. And I love that. I wish more publishers and developers had the guts to dredge up the forgotten dregs of the past and not just repackage them but restore them for a new audience. I was prepared for Nightdive to take a pass at remastering Turok 3 because it would be financially unviable. It wasn’t the smart thing to do. It was the right thing to do. So, they forged onward and made it happen with their signature flourishes. Respect from top to bottom. Certainly makes it difficult to slap a score on it, though.

Now, what about Turok: Rage Wars?

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}