Back in the days when we had to pay £70 for the privilege of playing our Nintendo 64 titles, the original Turok was really rather popular. Given that our initial offerings were rather slim and that there were strange people out there who preferred a bit of dinosaur hunting to popping around weird green gardens as everyone’s favourite Italian oaf Mario this might not have been so much of a surprise in retrospect, and a few pretty decent sequels confirmed that Turok was indeed a pretty handy series indeed.

As with so many things, though, fortune has taken a rather sorry nosedive for all things Turok since about 2000, with some pretty average titles and the bankruptcy of original fathers Acclaim Entertainment and Iguana in 2004 (you could be cynical and suggest the two issues were slightly linked, perhaps). It’s from this tangled rubble that the latest installation – simply named Turok – emerges, with expectations not particularly high taking the above-mentioned and an extremely average demo into account.

The storyline sees you take on the role of Turok (surprisingly), who this time is a Mohawk wearing badass ripped straight from the Generic Book of Heroes with a bad attitude presumably picked up on a two-for-one bargain in the same place. You awaken on a spaceship that is attacked in orbit and sent plummeting toward a planet, after which you stumble to your feet and find out that the only other survivor nearby is –shock horror – also the only guy on board who knew your troubled history and doesn’t trust you. Hum.

From your very first moments in the game, two main things strike you: Turok isn’t as bad as you thought it might have been, and it actually looks really quite good graphically. The first portion of the game is spent scuttling across a jungle environment with your cohort, and throughout there’s a scattered supply of dinosaurs and humans to shoot and knife your way through, all whilst being surrounded by some lush green scenery. It’s enough to lift your hopes that the game might turn out to actually be rather good, against all hopes.

Unsurprisingly, this feeling doesn’t last too long. Quite quickly you are ambushed by a pack of annoying small, quick dinosaurs, at which point you notice that actually aiming at the bloody things is a complete pain in the backside. No matter what sensitivity you set the aiming to, Turok guides his weapon around the screen with all the precision of a monkey on a particularly bad acid trip, and said twitchiness really begins to grind when you have to take on more than a few enemies at once. In a game where you’re going to be doing a heck of a lot of shooting, this isn’t the kind of problem you’re going to be able to sweep under the rug.

Hence, it’s to the game’s melee weapon of choice – the knife – that you find yourself turning. The ability to sneak or run up to an enemy and plunge your weapon into some crucial part of their anatomy is initially damn good fun and rather satisfying, but pretty soon the novelty wears off and you begin to get frustrated that the method of doing so – pressing A when prompted – is rather temperamental, leading to occasions where you end up running around an enemy like a complete idiot mashing the A button until Turok launches into his stabbing animation.

This could have been relieved if the game had allowed you to make effective use of stealth, but unfortunately most attempts at going all Sam Fisher on proceedings don’t really work too well. Sneaking up behind a human enemy is practically impossible due to the little gits somehow randomly detecting your presence, and the lack of cover opportunities from the landscapes and constructions around you practically force your hand and leave you with the Rambo route as your only viable option. The only part of the game that does cater well for a little care is when using the bow, which allows you to satisfyingly take out enemies from a distance with a well-aimed arrow here and there.

The main issue with Turok, though, is just how average it all feels. You progress from jungle to cavern, from open plain to underground base and so on so forth, and yet at no stage does it ever really peak your interest. The story that threads its way through all the blasting is as standard as you can get, the characters are clichéd and the actual game itself is nothing that we haven’t seen before in any facet, leaving Turok feeling distinctly like the videogame version of boiled chicken on a bed of boiled rice. Nice enough, perhaps (not to mention healthy!), but rather bland and the kind of thing that if you spend too long with will leave a rather indistinct impression.

It’s not that it’s for the lack of trying, obviously. The game makes pretty handy use of the Unreal engine given the vast outside expanses it throws you into, with some rather pretty surroundings and a selection of pretty authentic-looking dinosaurs poddling about and trying to relieve you of your arms and face. This most certainly isn’t another case of Conflict: Denied Ops where the whole package was rife with issues; Turok does show a fair amount of spit and polish, and overall it’s a very solid title.

Solid doesn’t mean great, though, and that’s the game’s downfall. It does have the option for you to play through the game with a pal in co-op on Xbox Live (although no splitscreen option is offered, sadly), or to play against a whole selection of foes in some standard multiplayer modes such as Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, but your interest in these modes will no doubt be blunted by the fact that you could be playing multiplayer modes on games far more popular and with far more options on offer, such as Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3.

Hence, it’s unlikely that Turok will hold your attention for all that long. It certainly merits a playthrough of the campaign at least once and perhaps even a couple of hours on the multiplayer side of the coin, but there’s no hook to keep you coming back time and again as weeks with the game turn to months. It’s by no means a terrible game, nor sadly is it a particularly good one; the grave that Turok will end up lying in when people look back in retrospect is one of a rather run-of-the-mill game that ticked the boxes it needed to but did very little else.