You asked what other game has Native American themes, Turok is an answer, a right answer. You can't just say "that game is meh, so it doesn't count."
The last game made by neogaf's very own Bishoptl? Definitely 'meh' by any stretch of imagination.
There's nothing really appealing about it, except for the presence of dinosaurs. Which doesn't mean much when every gunfight feels like shooting dummies that barely move. I realize it's not quite fair to blame a studio for inexperience with UE3 or engaging game design (building on previous iterations) and properly animating the dinosaurs must have cost a huge amount of resources, but in the end, that's what the product was.
And the T-rex fight(s) are extremely annoying. Something between the FOV and your movement speed, but finding some way of avoiding that fucker is almost the entire battle.
It's as the 'making of' vids in Halo 2 Limited Edition put it: "if a game isn't fun for five minutes, it's never going to be fun". Turok has a metacritic rating of 69 btw and is owned by Disney, making it's return to glory very unlikely.
Besides, if you can't contradict the current Turok with the Turoks of old (Tal'Set and the 'racist feather' headbanc and all), there is not much point to the exercise of making one. The last Turok was a typical space marine with dinosaurs game, and not much else. No 'the lost land exists' easter egg or anything to make you at least want a sequel or anything.
The game ultimately 'explains' the planet by citing it as being put on a trajectory of 'hyper evolution' which is never explained, mentioned again, or even relevant in the most basic sense.
Maybe the old Turok games were just lucky. The fog was due to hardware limitations, but it did by accident also provoke a sense of the fog being more like a property of the Lost Land. The moment Turok failed was when the fog went away in Turok Evolution (PS2), in contrast to what you would have expected at the time.
Looking at metacritic and some other sources, it also seems that the industry has not been kind to David Dienstbier's career post-Turok Evolution.
Well, at least the comics returned. (from 2010 and ongoing)
