Turok: Origins will revisit the dinosaur hunter in a co-op third-person shooter

Will the shooting of my beloved dinosaurs never stop? Turok: Origins will revisit the dino-hunting archery of ye olde Nintendo 64 and reimagine it as a story of three native hunters out to paralyze giant lizards. The big new angle is that it will be a third person shooter and you can play in online co-op as a team of T-rex wreckers. You then slurp up their dino DNA to upgrade your character. Come see these crimes against nature in the trailer below.

There will be a lot of melee attacks by the looks of things, but a shootybang is a shootybang. Players are promised “plasma rifles, beam cannons, snipers, bows, shotguns and more”, while the DNA powers will complement this combat (one power looks like a time-freezing bubble). There’s also a story to follow, somewhere, but we haven’t been told what it’s about yet. Only that it’s “epic” and will see the warriors visit plenty of fancy locations “from ancient temples and wasteland canyons to dense jungles”.

This is not the first time the series has been revived. A reboot simply titled Turok was released in 2008 to mixed reviews. It sold well enough for developers at Propaganda Games to start working on a sequel, but not well enough to prevent its sequel is canceled the following yearwhich resulted in 70 dismissals at the studio. How times change, eh? We would never see that kind of reckless firing today!

In any case. It’s being made by Saber Interactive, the many studio publishers that specialize in working on licensed properties, and a relatively safe pair of hands. They made Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, World War Z, Evil Dead: The Game, among others. Saber is also working on another dinosaur game, Jurassic Park: Survival, which looks less violent towards the beautiful creatures and therefore morally more forgivable.

If I’m mad with the jungle shooter, please forgive me. It was showcased at The Game Awards, which aired in the early hours of this morning and has claimed all my Rock Paper brethren, leaving only two survivors: me and guide guru Jeremy. The team was in the process of broadcasting a lot of the news, and before Ollie expired from a chronic case of video games, he wrote a big summary of all the games revealed at the Game Awards 2024. It’s hugely practical, that.