I never actually had a chance to play Turok, the classic dinosaur-hating FPS that first released in 1997. This was in the dark age of gaming where you depended on physical copies and for some reason the only local store has exactly 5 copies that sold out instantly...

Now with the remaster releasing this Thursday, 17th of December to be specific, it would appear I'll finally have a chance to see what all the fuss is about. Here's a list of the improvements the remastered edition is bringing to the table:

New features include:

- Support for high resolutions, and widescreen

- Improved gameplay and level design

- OpenGL for video backend to provide portability and support for vertical sync

- Dynamic lighting, bloom, FXAA, enhanced water effects, lights shafts and more

- Ability to freely rebind all keyboard, mouse, and gamepad inputs

- Steam Achievements

From what I've seen in the trailer and the screenshots the game does look quite heavily improved from its original version although it still doesn't look great but you can't work wonders with 20 year old models and textures. But what they could've improved and yet I don't see mentioned anywhere is sound which has me slightly worried they might've left in the original version rather than reworking that as well but for now its impossible to tell.

I do have one complaint about the graphics however. In a lot of the old screenshots the draw distance is quite poor and obscured with fog so the natural progression there was to remove the fog in the remaster and for the most part that works great. However, when a location is located near a ledge in the old version you would see the drop obscured with fog but in this new version all you see is a straight and empty drop down.

This image for example would be much improved with a bit of fog obscuring the great void beyond

Personally I would've left the heavy fog on for those areas because its both atmospheric and it helps mask the game's "flaws" in the same way the original did but I doubt I'm the first one that said this so I'm imagining the fog issue was an "all or nothing" conundrum and they've opted to improve most of the game while harming only a few pieces of it.

These graphics complaints aside I'm still interested in Turok and hopefully it ends up being everything decades of hype have built it up to be.