So I tried it out. Only got through level 1 on hardcore so far, and nearly got through the riding gun section in level 2 but fell into a pit like a moron and stopped there. (It was totally not my fault either, why the heck would you bind the dino's charge attack to RMB and the little alternate cannon to jump?? I kept mixing those two up).
You know what? It plays so damn good that my inner purist almost immediately shut up. Literally, less than a minute into the game I forgot why I didn't want changes to the levels and gameplay. Well, no, maybe not the gameplay, as I do feel that the game lost some of its identity with the main character being so maneuverable, but that's not a big deal. It's still a great game, and much more accomodating to people who wouldn't have been conditioned to love the original as a child like I have, it being my first PC game and only PC FPS for a long time.
Now, there's still a lot of things I'd complain about. Though they're not things I expected. For one: IMO not enough graphical options. I would like to lower the contrast, for example, or turn down the sunlight or something, because level 1 is overly bright outside in some places but can be nearly pitch black inside. I would like being able to disable shadows (they produce some fugly artifacts in places, like in the beginning of level 3 there's a shadow of a tree on a cliffside for no reason) and those ugly perfectly round light flashes when someone shoots or bullets hit a wall.
Another thing, for all the talk about fixing the levels, almost every goddamn wall in level 1 (and so far many in level 2's beginning) has some broken geometry visible above it, and VERY clearly, too. Usually it's backs of the models from other areas and you can see that they're missing the back side polygons. There's so much of it it almost feels like it was deemed okay because otherwise it would be too much work to fix. And a lot of the architecure has quite prominent shading problems, probably due to a much more contrasted directional light from the sun (why is there a sun in an overcast level like level 1 anyways??).
There's also less common error-seeming things. Like there's a column that has its broken off top part not completely attached to its base part, so it kinda floats some centimiters above it. It's somewhere, I think, after that one little courtyard where you come down a slope, can jump on two roofs, one of which has a full health, and there's a respawning ammo/health place beyond some doors that has raptors in it, and there's also a passage to a little girl cage behind some crates. So I think the column in question is in whatever area's right after that. I've made a screenshot, I'll post it when I'm back home. Another weird thing is right at the beginning of level 1, across the bay there's a weird clump of a health pickup, a pistol clip and an arrow quiver all in the same place, inside each other - what's up with that?
Also, what's up with most raptors having an alternate, worse looking texture than the original one? It makes them look like asphalt.
And I hope enemies are supposed to be tougher on the hardcore difficulty, because as a veteran Turok 2 player, a pistol headshot not killing a dinosoid is just not right. Now you shoot their heads like three times and they explode, where before it was much more satisfying because you could land that one accurate shot and the head would just jerk back really quickly and they'd fall over dead. Maybe it works on lower difficulties?
I also couldn't get that death animation on a purr-linn where they get a huge hole in their belly. Props for making the chaingun motherfuckers actually properly vulnerable, though. That was a problem.
Some graphical things are really ugly. The blood decals (really flat), the game over graphic(looks out of place), and Joshua's head near the life counter (looks REALLY goofy) for example.
Some level alterations so far make no sense to me. That big coutryard where you can shoot down all the gulls and get access to an ultra health. Why is the switch opening the building with the key just down on the ground level now? You used to have to jump off from the top level into a room, it was kind of a babby's first neat jump. Was that breakable with the ledge grab? Surely it couldn't have been deemed too difficult. Or just to remove like 20 seconds of backtracking?
There's also some other minor things that kinda bother me. Why can't you skip the level intros? You can disable them, but going into the options and disabling them and then enabling them again just to avoid watching one specific cutscene is really stupid. Not to mention you can't even open a menu or load a game when a cutscene's playing. That's REALLY bad. Also, changing the OST doesn't do anything until you force the music to restart. Maybe restart it automatically when the player changes that option, like the sound device option in zdoom?
But anyway, my long and scattered complaints aside, I fucking love this remaster. The ledge-grabbing surprisingly didn't bother me (though it's really inconsistent because some obstacles are infinitely tall despite looking to be the same ledge-grabbable height), the little level alterations didn't bother me for the most part, and I actually really liked the all-new area in level 1 in the boat section (I got hit with this powerful wave of the good old feeling of exploration and immersion, as if I was playing this game for the first time again, and just because of a little new addition!That was a great feeling). Even if it's not as faithful as I would've hoped, it plays too damn well to complain about. Kinda reminds me of Doom 2016 in that regard, which I also thought was nothing like the original but an amazing game in its own right.
Edited by Antroid
