Instead of playing a time-traveling warrior hunting for pieces of a staff with the power to alter time, you assume the role of a black-ops grumbler named Joseph Turok fighting somewhat more realistically rendered raptors, oversized bugs and the occasional T-rex here. Getting to the dinosaurs, which this version still trots out like climbing rungs on an org chart, takes only a few minutes after you crash-land on a backwoods planet that—go lotto odds—just happens to be teeming with the toothy carnivores.

While Turok's arsenal of guns, including the option to dual-wield pistols and automatic weapons, resembles any other shooter's, it's possible to play the bulk of the game using only his glorified bowie knife and tension bow. Surprise enemy soldiers (they're protecting a fugitive war criminal holed up on the planet) and the game plays a grisly non-interactive animation of Turok eviscerating his victim. Defend yourself from lunging dinos by obeying timed button displays and Turok tattoos jugulars. If that doesn't do the trick, tap the button immediately thereafter and he'll plunge his blade into eyes, skulls, necks, gullets and more. Manual knife slashing is effectively purposeless, however, and functional kills come down to simply pulling a trigger on cue.

Using the bow, on the other hand, enables distance stealth kills with regular or explosive arrows, though the game's idea of stealth is limited purely to line of sight (you're either in or you're not, regardless of scrub coverage). Hold the trigger longer to charge a shot and you'll pull off the game's only interesting maneuver: pinning human enemies to walls.

Another day, another dinosaur

Dinosaur mania reached fever pitch in 1993 with Jurassic Park, and it's been a protracted if inevitable fall from grace since. Watching scaly reptiles pose in video games these days is a little like watching 1980s action heroes waving Uzis and shouting how they're going to get you (sucka). That about sums up Turok, where you don't hunt platform-evolved dinosaurs so much as cliches.

And by way of cliches, too. Since Propaganda's notion of difficulty involves plunging you into arbitrary arenas and leveraging enemies that rely on crude "charge" or "retreat" AI routines, progression through mazelike levels feels like grinding chopwork. Charge along outdoor paths that feel less like jungles than tunnels with trees, picking off enemy soldiers who fight like placards with firearms. Run through dimly lit caves knifing dinosaurs that spill mundanely from holes like packing peanuts and offer about as much challenge. Navigate middle-of-nowhere structures, occasionally riding sluggish elevators where waves of bad guys spring from behind doors in exactly the same quantity and sequence no matter how many times you reload.

Encounters are based on painfully visible trigger points, in other words, so that no matter how successfully or stealthily you approach a situation, you're always triggering the same helicopter landings, dinosaur charges and troop deployments. Worse, the game tends to auto-save liberally during downtempo stretches, but neglects to advance the ball at any point during lengthy 10- to 15-minute suicide missions where survival hinges mostly on securing a reliable hiding spot and letting your indestructible teammate(s) fend off enemies.

In other words, Turok has all the trademark facets and flaws of a perfectly run-of-the-mill shooter. It's more dinosaurs in a zoo with you as safari-hunting tourist trailing stereotypically butch teammates. If you don't care about well-written or particularly extended stories, exciting next-gen visuals, clever level design or even modestly evolved shooter mechanics, then there might just be a game here for you.