It's odd that in a society so devoted to moving forward, we have an insatiable appetite for nostalgia. Just look at the movie theater where Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Miami Vice were all brought back from the dead with middling results. Or on TV where you can see updates of American Gladiators and Knight Rider anchoring NBCs spring offerings with equally middling results. It's not surprising therefore that gamers have similar lust for their childhood memories and have shown a willingness to pay to get them back. That concept led Touchstone to dig up one of gaming's more memorable fossils; the dinocidal Turok series.

As expected you play as Turok, this time a space marine with a mohawk fetish who's only relation to the protagonists of previous games is his Native American ancestry, choice of weaponry, and predilection for running into dinosaurs on a regular basis. Oh, and the silly name. Turok was once a prisoner given a second chance in a famed regiment called the Wolf Pack under charismatic leader Roland Kane. After turning his life around under Kane's guidance his mentor goes rouge and Turok is transferred into a new company sent to track down Kane. In case you're wondering, yes that is a bit of a rip-off of Metal Gear Solid 3, but here's where things take a turn. Turok's ship is shot down on a planet full of dinosaurs. Why? Because dinosaurs are awesome that's why.

What ensues is a first person shooter that is, you guessed it, middling. You get a standard set of weapons with assorted dual wielding possibilities plus a couple of low-tech alternatives: a bow and arrows, and a hunting knife. In most games those weapons would probably be a mild gimmick and little more, but here you're actually better off using them than you would be charging around with the standard FPS combo of dual SMGs and a bad attitude.

The reason for this is that the targeting system is extremely difficult to control to the point where any attempts at shooting accurately is simply not worth the frustration in tense firefights or dinosaur ambushes. This also manages to ruin the bow, which would be a highly effective stealth and sniping tool if it weren’t so hard to aim. Even if you have the patience to use the bow effectively, the game treats finding ammo for it as some sort of reward for exploration. Arrows will only be found in secret areas, and if you run out, you can expect to spend a good deal of time combing levels you'd rather just breeze through looking for arrows. You can forget about picking up your spent arrows too. Once they're gone they're gone for good.

While the targeting is the biggest problem with Turok, the arrow annoyance is one of a bunch of other little issues that, for the most part, seem like results of developer inexperience rather than incompetence or some sort of demented grudge against the player. For one, Turok is a rather bouncy fellow from the way he walks and jumps to the way he climbs ladders. This, combined with the camera's constant need to whoosh in and out of Turok's head like some sort of indecisive poltergeist, makes for a rather nauseating experience. I, for one, had to take a number of breaks during gameplay to keep from ruining my favorite lounge chair.

Even though the knife is often the best weapon available for multiple situations the game throws at you, there’s a problem there as well. For some reason the special knife kills that are what actually make the knife useful and deadly must be initiated after an on-screen button prompt rather than just responding properly when you're in range of a bad guy. This means that if you're trying to use the knife in a frantic scuffle with a dino or trying to get a drop on a human enemy, you must wait for the prompt rather than relying on your own sense of timing. This generally makes using the knife a choppy and unintuitive experience.

On top of that, the game really seems to try to encourage stealth from the player. It gives you less health than most FPS protagonists and a number of silent and deadly weapon options. Even then it's inevitable that Turok's going to end up in a few big firefights and, it's almost equally inevitable that the player will die once in a while during these big firefights because of limited, stealth-encouraging, health. Rather than getting sympathy in this situation in which you've basically died as a result of developer laziness, the game acts like it's your fault for failing to live up to their expectations, shows you an annoyingly long load screen, and then dumps you back at whatever checkpoint you had the luck to have reached before. This can be up to 10 minutes of gameplay back from the firefight, and it can take multiple tries at times to figure out the best way to dispatch the regiment of enemies waiting for you up ahead. Needless to say, this got frustrating quickly.

There are also a few other little things like the level design, which is linear, boxy, boring, and just downright ugly. Touchstone seems to have put together a rather good voice cast including Timothy Olyphant (fresh off a game-related project in the Hitman movie) the black alien guy from Stargate, and home wrecking game show host Donnie Whalberg, but the sound quality of in game effects and dialogue is terrible for some reason.

Mostly Turok just gives you a general feeling of playing a game that was crafted with less than steady hands. A game made by a developer using you as a guinea pig so they can learn from their mistakes and make a better game next time. More power to them if they can get better. But did they have to sacrifice good ol' Turok along the way?