DEVELOPER: Acclaim Studios Austin (original)/Nightdive Studios (remaster)

PUBLISHER: Nightdive Studios

REVIEWED ON: Nintendo Switch from a copy purchased by the author.

To read out thoughts on the Nintendo 64 original, click HERE.

It’s fair to say that the Nintendo 64 was kept afloat against the juggernaut that was Sony’s first PlayStation because of Nintendo’s own intellectual properties like Mario, the Legend of Zelda, and Pokémon. During the 16-bit era, third-party game makers and publishers flocked to the Super Nintendo, but many supporters jumped ship for a myriad of reasons, among them Nintendo’s firm stance on sticking with a cartridge based delivery system instead of embracing optical media.

One company that flourished on the console, however, was Acclaim. Early in the Nintendo 64’s life cycle, they found themselves with an unexpected hit with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, a first-person shooter that beat even the mighty GoldenEye 007 to the market and showed that the genre could grow beyond the PC before anyone ever uttered the phrase “slappers only”. It went on to be a best-selling title on the Nintendo 64, not to mention the only third-party offering in the first wave of “Players Choice” titles.

If not for Nightdive Studios’ efforts, the Turok franchise would’ve met the same fate as the creatures the title character hunts. Over the past decade, the incredibly talented staff at Nightdive have remastered the Nintendo 64 originals and made them playable on every piece of hardware on the market. Now they’ve turned their attention to Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion, the last mainline Nintendo 64 exclusive Turok entry released back in the fall of 2000.

Like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil before it, Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion – Remastered has supplanted the original as the single best way to enjoy Turok 3. While Turok 3 is still a highly enjoyable title and worthy of an immediate purchase if you’re nostalgic for the series, retro first-person shooters or are simply a fan of Nightdive’s work, revisiting this oft-forgotten chapter in this once thriving franchise doesn’t hit the same way the other 2 titles did upon their reemergence. This is less a slight against Nightdive’s work and more of the overall design choices made by the original development team.

Shadow of Oblivion – Remastered can best be described as how you remember playing its first iteration brought to life. Nightdive’s team of developers and proprietary engine, known as Kex, have resurrected Turok 3 in the best way imaginable. As a late release on the Nintendo 64 – Turok 3 launched the same year as the PlayStation 2 and into the second year of the Dreamcast’s life in North America – it was an impressive showcase of what Nintendo’s first 3-D capable machine could do.

Though it didn’t quite wow in the same way that Resident Evil 2‘s port did in 1999 with its compressed full-motion video sequences, Turok 3 featured an impressive amount of voicework and cut-scenes. These cinematics were made even more astonishing due to the fact that they appeared to be in engine with lip synched character models. Turok 2 also had voice acting from the character Adon providing context to each area you travelled to, but her mouth stayed firmly closed whenever she was in frame.

To show just how much attention Nightdive put into bringing back Turok 3, one only needs to watch the side-by-side comparison video the developer produced showing their touched up cut-scenes next to the originals. WARNING: If you have never played Turok 3, watching the whole video will spoil what happens in the story.

As you can see from only the first few minutes alone, everything from the character models to the lighting has been given a loving makeover. This touch has been applied throughout the entire game, and not just limited to the story sequences. Like all of Nightdive’s titles, there’s a plethora of ways to adjust the visuals from adding filters to toying with just about every visual setting imaginable. You can also rebind the controls to suit however you want to play.

Before the days of dual-analog controls, developers had to get creative in how they designed shooters. In the case of the Turok series, the default controls had you moving with the 4 C-buttons and aiming with the analog stick. Here you can play just like every post Halo: Combat Evolved FPS and both move and aim with 2 analog sticks. If you want, there’s even an option to add things like aim assist if you find yourself having trouble lining up tricky shots.

For the purposes of this review, Turok 3 was largely played in handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch with some brief dock play on a standard, non-OLED Nintendo Switch. Jumping back and forth between the form factors felt natural, and it never once felt like you missing anything by playing one way or the other.

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion – Remastered is worth its asking price, but its funny that Nightdive have retroactively made the closing chapter of the trilogy less interesting than its siblings. When I reviewed Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion as part of the “Year of Acclaim” feature for this site back in 2015, I easily recommended it over Turok 2 at the very least due to the first sequels punishing save system. When Nightdive touched up Turok 2, they made it far more palatable by adding a feature to help you locate keys as well as mission objectives, and most importantly, the ability to save anywhere. On the Nintendo 64, you could only save at designated points and each time you recorded your progress it took up nearly an entire memory card.

When Turok 3 landed, it felt like a course correction from Turok 2. For starters, you could save at generous checkpoints and the need to backtrack to collect keys and other power-ups was removed. The trade off was that it made the adventure far more linear with only one real collectible found within each level to build the trademark super weapon, and even those are not hidden particularly well. There’s some switch flipping and a few maze-like structures to navigate, but largely you’re funneled down one path.

On the Nintendo 64, Turok 3 was more welcoming than its immediate predecessor which was perhaps too ambitious, but in the remaster trilogy, it’s still fun but not as engaging in comparison. Turok 3 is a far shorter game than even the original, clocking in at just a handful of hours to see it through to the end. You have your choice of 2 protagonists here, Joseph and Danielle who’s the first playable female in the series, but their paths are largely similar despite each getting unique weapons and traversal tools. Danielle can maneuver with a pre-Metroid Prime grappling hook while Joseph can crawl through tight spaces and can use night-vision goggles. Each have a shared pool of weapons, including the fan favorite cerebral bore that never once gets boring to fire.

A complaint going back to its Nintendo 64 debut with Turok 3 is that its environments just aren’t as interesting to explore as the titles that came before it. Thanks of Nightdive, they all look better than ever of course, but you don’t see a tree or dinosaur until you’re well into the 3rd chapter. Leading up to that you’re navigating city streets and a generic warehouse that feel more like every first-person shooter of the era and less like a Turok game.

As it arrived when the Nintendo 64 was on life support and the video game playing masses were jumping head first into the at-the-time next-generation, there’s a chance many didn’t even know a third Turok game even existed. If you missed it when it was new, or are nostalgic to revisit it, Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion – Remastered comes highly recommended despite the fact that it has perhaps not as interesting revival compared to Nightdive’s other Turok touch ups. It’s still an engaging first-person shooter with fun weaponry to play around with, and another shining example of Nightdive’s tireless devotion to preserving video game history.

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion – Remastered is available now on the PlayStation and Xbox family of consoles, Nintendo Switch and PC.