Announced at The Game Awards in 2024, Turok Origins aims to bring back the classic first-person shooter franchise to the modern era for the first time since 2008’s Turok. To catch you up, Turok is a dinosaur-hunting first person shooter/adventure series that started back in 1997 with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on the Nintendo 64, which was developed by Acclaim Entertainment and based off a comic book character with the same name. The game spawned a couple sequels (which are currently available in remastered form courtesy of NightDive Studios), and the series has been dormant since the 2008 re-imagining developed by the now defunct Propaganda Games.
Now being developed and published by Saber Interactive, Turok Origins is being positioned as a prequel of sorts to the older games in the series, where you are part of a squad known as the Turok Warriors that’s taking the fight to the Xenia, a deadly force of alien-like Reptilians seeking world domination.
Where the N64 Turok games were first-person shooters with plenty of exploration and platforming, Turok Origins is positioned more like an Unreal Engine 5-powered, level-based, combat heavy shooter with brief bouts of exploration that can be played solo or in co-op with two other teammates. During Summer Game Fest Play Days, Saber Interactive brought in two demos for the game where you could test the game as a completely solo, offline enabled single player experience running on Nintendo Switch 2, or play through the same levels in co-op on PC.
Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to test the game on Nintendo Switch 2, but got to experience the PC version with three player co-op with my colleague Ray and a Saber Interactive representative. We were told the game is being developed so that it can accommodate single player and co-op play styles individually, where in single player your character gets access to all kinds of weapons and abilities for you to customize as you see fit, while in co-op those abilities and weapons are separated between different classes similar to what you see in a hero shooter.
Whether the solo experience can stand on its own is something I can’t vouch for myself (speaking with others that played it solo, it sounded encouraging), but I can totally vouch for the co-op experience, which was a solid, gory fun time in the two levels we got to play. You can definitely see how the game pays homage to the history of Turok with the weapons at your disposal, which I vividly remember from my time with the N64 original when I was a wee lad. As seen with the reveal trailer, Turok Origins can be played in third person, which seems sacrilegious considering the series’ FPS origins, but has been worked with certain mobility and melee abilities that make it work well in that mode. Thankfully, you have the option to switch to first person mode at any point for a more pure, traditional Turok experience, which is how I played the majority of my demo, and you only have to deal with brief stints where doing melee attacks and melee executions takes you to third person.
As for the mission design, in the two missions we played the game seemed a tad more straight-forward, where you usually would be holding your ground from waves of enemies as you make your way through the level until you reached a boss fight near the end. While the first level was a straightforward, traditional jungle environment, the second level did at least offer instances of platforming and light exploration, which in a controlled co-op environment with limited play time didn’t let me fully grasp what was there, but its something I’m more interested in exploring via solo play.
Turok Origins is currently aiming for a release later in 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2. Look forward to more coverage of the game as we get closer to its release!
