being that i'm really not much of an fps-er (due in part to my massive amount of suckage in the genre that stems back to early attempts at doom and quake in the mid-nineties) i had two expectations coming into these two:
1) i would like turok, since i didn't mind the 64 game, way back, and i couldn't see a foreseeable way to not like a game with raptors and guns.
2) i would hate 'the club' since the premise and gameplay sounded kind of stupid, basically a tony hawk style multiplayer combined with killing people using semi-automatic weaponry.
as is expected i was wrong on both counts.
demo'd: turok
scenary
well, for the demo, they went with the tired old beef of mine, the underground/closed in space level where there is nowhere to hide or run.
it looked ....alright i guess, but because of the lack of light and constantly being jumped by vicious velociraptors, it was hard to appreciate my surroundings.
chars
the dude, for this i'll call him john turok*, as i can't remember if that's his name or not, is another 'deep-talker' carrying a big stick, or automatic weapon really.
he's not big on the personality, but more on the ridiculously obvious statements like 'be careful' or 'this looks strange' when he sees a corpse.
gameplay
not only is he a little shy, mr. turok can't fight worth s**t. at least not with me at the controls. it may have been partly due to my suckage at fps games, or the fact that i'm tired or playing claustrophobic levels with monotone backgrounds (see. cave) that don't feel fun in any way.
i started off with a partner in crime, and very quickly, he too was seperated from me, leaving me to be quickly taken down by 4 raptors, while i shot bullets that must have been made of pillows or marshmallows, because they didn't seem to effect or slow down any of the dinosaurs i was shooting.
so, yeah, i felt that maybe the gameplay wasn't balanced. again, i concede i may just suck, but it wasn't fun...really at all.
controls
there were some. they were pretty much what you'd expect. right trigger shoot, left stick move.
verdict
this is a big miss for me, which is a shame, because i was decently anticipating this one. i just don't see a reason to track down someone to try out a game with a miserable, predictable and un-fun demo.
demo'd: le (the) club
premise
for this one, i feel the premise (or lack thereof) for this game is important to understanding it.
the plot, i guess, is that you play one of a number of differently skilled assassin's, mercenaries, former cops and soldiers and just plain whack jobs that have been offered a sum of money (or to be taken away from their debts and criminal records) to compete in a tournament where man-hunting and killing is the name of the game.
if this sounds a lot like the premise to bruce lee's last and greatest work, enter the dragon then you and i are on the same page.
gameplay
the club - or le club as i've come to refer to it - plays a lot like a game of pinball, or tony hawk. while the aim is the same as most fps's in that you need to get from point a to point b while shooting a bunch of guys, there is one fundamental difference.
like a game of pinball, but more like tony hawk and other 'extreme' sports games, for each kill you get, you get another bar of multiplier to your score. but to keep this multiplier going, you need to keep getting kills. it will slowly tick down for every second you spend not killing. after a certain amount of time, it will move down to the next lowest multiplier until eventually bottoming out.
you still have to balance this against health concerns and eventual exit of the level, but you are also rewarded, much like tony hawk, for variety of kills - headshots, zoomed in snipe shots, explosive shots, etc. - and penalized for doing a lot of the same.
while i don't think i'll be checking out the full game, it's at least nice to see some innovation in the fps genre beyond fancier weapons and nicer graphics.
controls
it has some but you probably won't need to worry about most of them besides the different location of the 'jump' or 'roll' commands and the 'zoom' one. these will just give you a boost in your killing if you work them into your 'lines'.
verdict
a cool little shooter that, for fans of the genre, may well be worth checking out, though without more details on the depth of the full game, i'd hesitate before buying it new.
and that's my little taste of demo'd for today, i hope it satiates your burning desire for information on gaming for now.
will update later when there's more news to report.
cha...
JD
*during my search for photos to illustrate the 'bullets that do nothing' in turok, i found out the main character in turok is actually called joseph turok! so i really wasn't far off...
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