Turok is a game that promises to take the player back in time. Your character, the eponymous Joseph Turok, is part of a hardened special forces crew tasked with taking down Roland Kane, a war criminal who has set up shop with his Mendel-Gruman Corporation soldiers on a remote planet. That planet, however, is being terraformed and has become a veritable Lost World; the home of ravenous Raptors, Pterodactyls, the towering T-Rex and, erm, giant scorpions. It's a spin with plenty of potential, but one that isn't really capitalised on. Turok, you see, takes the player back in time in more ways than one. This is a shooter trapped in conventions and technology that we thought we'd left behind long ago.

The scene is quite well set, however. The game opens aboard the soldiers' transport vessel, and Turok is immediately ostracised from the other men by virtue of his previous involvement with Wolf Pack – the very group they've been sent to shut down. As you'd imagine the game gradually reveals more about Turok's past as you progress, and the soldiers may or may not come to trust him. Care to hazard a guess as to how it'll turn out? Regardless, just as you're being sent to the familiar Weapons 101 tutorial aboard the ship, it's shot down and crash lands on the planet's surface. It's a nice nod to the fact that most players really don't need their hands held in a first person shooter.

The mission in disarray, Turok sets out with another soldier to search for other survivors amongst the widely-strewn wreckage, taking down any of Kane's men they come across, not to mention a parade of hungry dinosaurs. One of the first things you'll probably notice once Turok dusts himself off after falling from space is that this game isn't exactly on the bleeding edge graphically. While the character models and dinosaur models are certainly quite decent (albeit with otherworldly highlights), the wider environments look painfully dated. Textures are all uniformly ugly and low-res, while the sophisticated lighting that we've come to expect from modern titles is conspicuous by its absence. There's no doubt there's been a conscious decision to stick to a realistic colour palette for the game, but the result is quite murky much of the time, and we can't help but compare it to the hyper-realistic jungle environments achieved in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which absolutely wipe the floor with this game. While Turok's world has plenty of vegetation, and can at times conjure up a sense of awe from the towering trees and rock formations, this just doesn't feel like an organic, chaotic world. It feels like a videogame.

This impression is only underlined when you meet your first enemy soldiers. Not only are they amongst the most generic looking enemies we've come across in a while – straight from the 'oppressive fascist soldier' mould, with their identical dark liveries and humanity-obscuring helmets, but they're some of the thickest too. Oh sure, they may try and flank you and they may take cover, but at no point will you believe that these guys pose an intelligent threat. Observe their movements for a short while and you'll be able to spot all the cover points they move between, as well as the fact that when not in cover they keep moving simply to make themselves harder to hit. It's all disappointingly arbitrary. And once an enemy takes cover (for the sake of taking cover) it's just a matter of aiming at the spot you know he's going to pop out to and plugging him. The dinosaurs operate on the same basic principles as well, so while you'll occasionally watch (or encourage) a dynamic encounter between enemy soldiers and prehistoric predators, for the most part the dinosaurs don't present an intelligent challenge, just a fast-moving one. They also move between designated points - after we shot one dino out of a tree, for instance, another one scuttled across and took the exact same position.

That's by no means the worst the AI has to offer either - there were countless moments where we were reminded of the artifice of the world. Stabbing a Wolf Pack soldier in the head with a knife barely a metre away from his squad mate who simply continued on his patrol. Moving on after a colossal shoot-out only to find a soldier still at his post, staring off into the distance a few metres down the path. Strolling up to an enemy crouching down behind cover and introducing our knife to his throat via an eye socket. Friendly AI standing around getting shot. You get the idea. There's no sense of cohesion – just a whole lot of AI routines running separately, only occasionally overlapping.

Turok, then, is very much about quantity of enemies rather than quality. Soldiers and dinosaurs tend to come in waves, often assaulting your position from a few angles. Your arsenal is very much what you'd expect from a run of the mill FPS, and is certainly a whole lot tamer than previous Turok titles. Shotguns, SMGs, Mini-guns and Pulse Rifles are the order of the day here, with a side order of bow and sniper rifle. Aiming isn't nearly as smooth as we'd like; despite adjusting the control sensitivity we found the aiming reticule to be overly twitchy throughout, which made sniping soldiers slightly annoying and tracking fast-moving dinosaurs next to impossible. We're all for having dinos jump out at us every so often to give us a scare, but it happens constantly in Turok and the frantic backpedaling that's involved in taking them out with conventional weaponry isn't a rush, it's just annoying. And that's where the knife comes in.

The knife will doubtless become your weapon of choice against the vast majority of dinosaurs and plenty of the soldiers as well. Get close enough to an enemy and 'RT' will pop up on screen. Hit the right trigger and the game will cut to a third person sequence of Turok brutally dispensing said opponent. There are a few animations but they generally involve Turok jamming his knife through an eye socket then kicking the corpse away. There's no doubt these scenes are stylish and cool but there's also no doubt that the knife is grossly overpowered. You can be facing off against three or four dinosaurs and simply knife them one at a time because it's very rare that you'll be killed by a dinosaur attack, and Turok heals very quickly. And you will be attacked, whether you're using a gun or the knife. The first time it happens it's pretty cool – you'll either be knocked back, or dragged towards gaping maws and have to hammer a button or two to get out of it. Sadly, it all ends up looking pretty farcical as the most efficient way to enter fights is to basically run at dinosaurs hammering RT hoping to time it as the cue pops up. When you don't Turok makes a feeble stabbing motion and you get knocked down. When you do, you get a super-stylish cutscene and instant kill. There's no in-between.

Let's take a step back now and take a look at the game's level design. After all, tense, interesting level design can make up for a number of flaws in a title. As Turok makes his way towards the main wreckage of the ship and beyond he goes through a number of environments - an underground facility, a series of tunnels and caves, through the shell of an old installation in the jungle. Very little raises the game above competent, however. The designers have definitely tried to give the player options in moving through the world, so one of the more industrial rooms for instance, may have three levels of walkways that you can choose from, or there might be a left branch and right branch in the jungle that meet soon after, but this doesn't really do much to make the game more fun or the world more believable, particularly when the game falls back on old favourites like doors that exist only to spawn in guards and doors that are arbitrarily unlocked for you. Oh, and this game has one of the worst 'stay alive as the elevator platform rises and you're assaulted from all sides by multiple levels of soldiers' levels we've ever seen. It's certainly not all bad, but the sad fact is that most of the time we felt like we were simply going through the motions.