Christ do I love this series, and this game is awesome…to a point. You play the role of Johsua Fireseed, a Turok warrior (defenders of the universe, etc., etc.), and you have to save the universe…again. That's all relative to the whole Turok series, except Rage Wars, which is about embarrassing your friends who are not l33t en0ugh 4 j00…or something like that.

First thing I have to comment on is the graphics…and this point is a major, major double-edged sword. Why? Because as incredible as the graphics look, they cause an incredible amount of slowdown because the N64's processor just can't handle it. One minute your FPS's will be somewhere around 25 - 40, then they drop to 5.

The game is also HUGE. It took me about 16 hours to beat it the first time through, with a walkthrough and cheats. Yes, I'm cheap. Suck it. Back on topic, though. Despite the enormity of the levels (the first takes about 45 minutes to finish it with everything you need, such as completing the necessary mission objectives and getting all of those goddamn level keys), they are brilliantly detailed with, at the time, very realistic-looking environmental goodies (trees, skies, water, etc.) and the textures are out-of-this-universe.

Now onto the enemies. Extreme detail and care put into sound effects, skins, and of course, death animations. They spit, spray, and pool blood all over the place, it rocks. Movements and attacks are also very well done, and are for the most part very smoothe…except for pain code. If an enemy initiates an attack, they won't die from that head shot until after they hit you. Turok 3 also seems to suffer from this. Anyway, the other cool thing is that you can totally eviscerate the opposition, like blowing them in half with exploding shells, rending limb from torso with the Razor Wind, or blowing their legs off with "bouncin' betties" from your PFM Launcher. Yeah, baby, yeeeeaaaaah!!!

The bosses are also huge, and make Turok: Dinosaur Hunter's Cyber-Rex look like a play thing…actually, I found it to be one of the easier bosses of the game, come to think of it, so I guess I'll need a better comparison…anyway, they are, for the most-part, absolutely enormous. It also uses the old NES technique of "hit here, then here, then here, and when it starts flashing, it's gonna die", or something very close to that effect.

Weapons graphics and effects are very cool, especially the flamethrower, firestorm and shredder. The shredder is a shotgun that fires bouncing pellets, although the coup de grace is that it also fires ricocheting exploding pellets. Bounce and blow, baby. Yeah. The Firestorm Cannon is a beefed up minigun that fires tracers with a really trippy effect, because all of the tracers explode in shades of green, magenta, and orange. Weird, but awesome. The flamethrower fires polygonised flame at your enemies, and it looks incredible in use. There are also other note-worthy weapons, like the PFM Layer, Razor Wind, Nuke, Stinger, and Sunfire Pods. The latter has limited use but just looks very cool, and the rest all have very interesting effects when used. I especially like the PFM Layer…although the Nuke has got some incredible graphic effects.

Overall, Turok 2 is an excellent game, and does much justice to its prequel - by surpassing it in almost every aspect while sticking to a similar formula (hub-like level progression, find the level keys, activate the teleporter), but is surpassed by the prequel in areas such as length. Much patience is required to get through this game. It is long, and there is much exploration required, but it's so nice to look at, you might as well. And despite the framerate suckage, it is not all the time, only in areas which have more detail than nec…I better shut up now about the framerate suckage, actually…Regardless, it is an excellent game which every N64 player must play at least once…if not for the graphics, the death animation's'll certainly attract them :p