 Sometimes you end up finding a game out of nowhere that really surprises you. No, Turok Evolution doesn't exactly reinvent the wheel, there's hardly anything original here, but after seeing what the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox versions of this game were like, I did not expect Turok Evolution on Game Boy Advance to be a 2D side-scrolling platformer to the point that it's practically a metal-slug clone. Where on Earth did this game come from? If you remember, Turok Evolution was released on 6th generation consoles as a prequel to the original Turok Dinosaur Hunter, and the gameplay was your usual first-person shooter stuff, even including a four-player split-screen multiplayer mode on GameCube and Xbox, which was pretty dang fun. But the Game Boy Advance port, released at the same time, was instead developed by a completely different group of people, RFX Interactive, and they created a completely different game. It's pretty standard stuff as far as side-scrolling run-and-gun games go, there's five areas featuring four levels per area making for 20 total levels. There's the usual weapon power-ups, there's armor, there's a clear-all attack, and there's eight total weapons you can hold onto, everything from a hand axe to spread laser rifles to missile launchers. It plays just about how you would expect, just from taking a quick glance at the gameplay here with the exception of these gallery shooter type levels that pop up here and there, but there is one large dinosaur-sized caveat with Turok Evolution. This game is absurdly difficult, and I don't mean the good kind, I mean the unforgiving throw your Game Boy Advance across the room kind. Certain enemies seemingly take two dozen shots to finally die, only to immediately respawn, and health replenishments are few and far between. You do at least have a health meter here, so no one-hit-death type stuff here, but that's a small comfort. For the last level of each area leading up to the boss fight, you have to go through a regular level where I don't think there's a single health kit before you fight the boss. That is ridiculous. Just look at the first level here, you have to keep firing constantly because these guys keep respawning, even right underneath you, and these dinosaurs take forever to kill, all while charging straight at you, and if they reach you, you might as well be dead, life meter or not. Oh yeah, and there's no checkpoints anywhere. I'm thinking when Turok Evolution was developed, they intended it to be used mostly as a two-player co-op game, because it does have that feature. It's just that it only really works with two actual Game Boy Advance's. I haven't really figured out how to get two-player to work on any Game Boy Advance emulator, so yeah, you'd need two copies of the game to play multiplayer. Also real quick, I should mention that there's no battery saves here either, only passwords. There is a story here, but I confess I'm not exactly all that familiar with the Turok storyline, but in 1886, a cavalry squadron wipes out an Indian tribe, except for one dude named Talset, before suddenly, of course, an interdimensional time warp thing appears and sucks them into a place called the Lost Land. Talset befriends the leader of the native tribe there named Jun, and together they make up the two playable characters in this game as they fight up the squadron leader, Bruckner's evil plans of killing anything and everything, I guess. So you respond in kind by killing anything and everything. That makes sense. So yeah, Turok Evolution isn't what you'd expect from a Turok game. It's a pretty good game. The sprite animations here are great, the backgrounds look nice, and the color palette really helps the game stand out. And I mean, come on, you run to the right and make stuff go boom. It's hard to go wrong with that. Problem is, as I said, that this game is ridiculously hard and not in a good way, so be prepared for that. Still, Turok Evolution usually goes for about $7 to $8 on eBay, so if you think you can take on this kind of challenge, at least it's affordable.