These days quality shooters are as common as bullets in a gun store, which means developers really need to step up their game (no pun intended -- oh, who are we kidding?) if they want to grab the attention of players still nursing calloused trigger fingers from last fall's orgy of triple-A bang-bangs.

And, for a while, it seemed as though Touchstone's crew of programmers had done just that. Trailers and screenshots of the dinosaur-blasting Turok showed off a dark and polished-looking thrill ride of a game; one filled with a mature atmosphere and sense of menace that the original Turok games for Nintendo64 couldn't have hoped to have captured. However, after spending several hours with the finished product, Turok comes off as perfectly competent yet fails to stand apart from the current crop of shooters in any significant way.

In fact, it's shamelessly derivative. The first few minutes feel like a clone of the movie Aliens as a bunch of marines step out of cryo-sleep pods on a spaceship and engage in a bit of snappy banter. Then things get a little Halo as the ship is attacked and you find yourself running through burning corridors before crash landing on an alien planet, where you hike around rocks and trees trying to find survivors. Meanwhile, you'll be hard-pressed not to think of the gravely-voiced roughnecks surrounding you, with their tree-stump limbs and battle-scarred faces, as a poor substitute for the gorgeously rendered jarheads in Gears of War. Oh, and then there's the whole being-stalked-by-dinosaurs-in-an-unexplored-jungle thing, which recalls all kinds of entertainments, from King Kong to Dino Crisis to Jurassic Park.

Suffice it to say you'll be in familiar territory. But the action can be quite good. Fighting dinosaurs is nerve-wracking, challenging stuff. The little ones move fast and hide in tall grass, making it extremely hard to get a bead. They'll hop up on your chest and start chomping at your neck before you know it, at which point guns become useless; you'll need to follow on-screen cues to press buttons that will show your Mohawked marine stabbing at it with a knife or breaking its back on his leg. And when they get bigger -- we're talking about the T-rex, obviously -- things get even more thrilling. Seeing its massive mug look through the screen at you can be surprisingly bone chilling.

But for every couple of things Turok gets right there's one thing it doesn't. Human foes, for example, are unutterably boring and lame compared to the dinos; cookie-cutter target practice to fill space between reptile battles. Plus, Turok's arsenal of weapons wants for excitement. Machineguns, sniper rifles, and grenades prove capable but blasé military implements. A compound bow mixes things up a bit, but it's a bit too unwieldy (it takes a long time to draw the string to full tension and reload) to be used for anything other than the occasional surprise attack.

As it turns out, your trusty knife, picked from a soldier's corpse at the game's outset, is the most satisfying weapon you'll lay hands on. It can be used for cinematic stealth kills, but you'll likely use it more often in a deadly one-on-one dino combat. It can be enormously exhilarating to stare down a raptor armed with only your blade. And when he starts to charge you'll have just a split second in which to press a button to trigger a gruesome scene in which Turok wrestles with and repeatedly stabs the attacking beast. Miss by a millisecond and you'll be knocked to the ground -- perhaps with the dinosaur on top of you.

However, as exciting as these moments are, even they become a little tired after watching the same few dino kill scenes repeat themselves ad nauseum.

Turok is fun, bottom line, but it's not extraordinarily compelling. Game store shelves are loaded with great shooters right now, and there's little to keep Turok from getting lost in the crowd. If you happen to have a thing for dinosaur-themed games, then, by all means, bump Turok to the top of your shopping list and happy reptile hunting. Otherwise, feel free to wait for this one to hit the bargain bins.

TIP: In Turok, most dinosaurs (save for the Dilophosaurs and the giant bugs) are best killed with your knife, surprisingly, so get up close and personal and save some ammo while you're at it. The dudes with the chainguns, on the other hand, are impervious to knife attacks and best dispatched with Tek arrows.