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What a frustrating game.

Like many of the action/FPS reviews I do, both my brother and I spent time playing this game. He actually put in more time than me, as he's more willing to deal with incredibly frustrating aspects of games like this that I would just say "You know what? No." to when I play them.

Let's start with the beginning.

This is a sort of reboot for the game series. I remember back from days of olde (it seems) hearing about how bad Turok games are. I'd never played them, however, and had heard good rumblings on this one from E3 last year. Thus, I was happy to give it a shot.

You start off with the obligatory opening movie showing you — John Turok — a Native American mercenary and how he gets wrapped up with a group called Whiskey Company. It sounds like you get to play a sullen, brooding badass! Wow, that is original and ... oh. Never mind. In fact, I didn't even like me when we started.

After your spaceship is shot down you go through a long part of trying to escape. Some of it is cinematic — hey, look, Joe Bob got sucked out of the darn airlock! — and others teach you some of the controls. Unlike some smarter games, Turok doesn't recognize when you keep looking the wrong direction and offer to invert the controls for you. Instead you have to go into the menu, find controls, realize that doesn't actually do anything, find the settings, navigate the slow menus...

And that's how it goes. Turok does things halfway for the player. The controls are either way too twitchy or way too sluggish. Some things are explained to you — here's how you do this — and other things, such as reloading, are not. It's just assumed. Seriously. Either give a real tutorial and explain everything, or don't bother.

Once you're on the planet you get to run around for a while without any weapons. That's always fun. Running. Then you get a single submachine gun with a bit of ammo (oh, boy!) and then later your knife.

You know, I'm not a huge Turok fan — but I know what Turok is about. It's about a guy with a bow and arrow and dinosaurs. At this point you've seen some of the dinosaurs, but I don't have my bow? Come on.

As you move in, you get to fight your first few bad guys, both human and dinosaur. The first encounters are a bit easy. You end up in a big fight with some small raptors, and that's where you learn to use your knife.

There are two ways of using your knife. If you don't have an icon on the screen, you just sort of slowly stab with it. Hint: it's useless. If you have a "RT" icon on the screen, you can violently kill a dinosaur or person with it. Meanwhile, you're getting damaged, and the screen turns so red you can hardly see, but it's better than wasting all your ammo just blasting in circles. Though you do get tired of that little animation very quickly.

Assuming, that is, you survive.

Shortly after that you have a larger run-in with lots of fun. Stand back and snipe with your slightly pathetic submachine gun and you'll eventually be hit with a headshot, it feels like — one shot and you're down. Rush in, two guns blazing (or even one) and they'll take you down. Eventually the AI remembers to send in a T Rex to take care of them for you. Thanks.

And then, there's your buddy. Half the time he'll run up and engage the enemies, the rest of the time he just stands there like a lump. Thanks, dude. I appreciate it.

That's how a lot of the game goes. The AI is so woefully inconsistent it's not even funny, except for parts that feel like you can only beat through random chance.

Add in those controls, and the fact that every time a big dinosaur hits you or an explosion goes off you go flying off your feet (a neat effect, I thought, just frustrating), and couple it with an extremely broken checkpoint system and you've got a huge cauldron full of "let's annoy the player".

The checkpoint system is something else I feel like I need to bring up. It is my opinion that there is no reason whatsoever for a modern video game to use a checkpoint system for saves. Yes, allowing a player to save at any time will let some players feel like it's "too easy". "Oh, I can save before the boss and just try over and over again."

On the other hand, a lot of players these days get frustrated by only being able to save at arbitrary points, thus having to have to throw away work to leave the game right away, or to have to continually say "just a few more minutes" to get to that elusive checkpoint. Of course, you also have to hope you don't die before reaching that checkpoint, and you lose the ability to go back a few saves and try again, too.

Turok compounds those problems with very spaced out checkpoints that usually entail multiple frustrating or simply long sequences in between them. You end up spending a lot of time running over the same parts as you fight the same battles over and over again trying to learn "the trick" to get through them.

Not everything about Turok is bad. It's pretty standard action movie style plot, but it's interesting enough. The voice acting helps a lot in there, even if it's starting to feel like Ron Perlman is in everything these days.

The graphics are rather nice, and for the most part, pretty well done. They're not perfect but I've seen worse; the only problem I had with some of the cinematic parts is how it jars you out of control of your own character to make absolutely certain you saw that majestic flight of dino-birds or whatever. If I'm controlling my character, let me control him, and hey, if I miss those birds, I miss ‘em. Don't make me feel like the puppet masters have me and are forcing me to look up on their beautiful work.

The sound is fine. The guns don't quite sound as good as the level set by some other games, but it matches up with the fact that a lot of the guns feel pretty wimpy.

You have a few different choices in guns but you'll find yourself sticking with specific ones for specific purposes, for the most part. The shotgun is almost too useful not to carry, as it has a flare mode that distracts dinosaurs, for instance, but in normal mode seems fairly weak against, well, everything. The pulse rifle isn't bad, and has a grenade launcher, but still feels like it takes way too many rounds to take someone out with (which doesn't help with the aiming system).

The neat thing is that there's no real ammo counter in your gun. Each gun will have a light or readout of some sort, but it's not on your screen. I liked that.

It might sound like I'm really dogging on the game. It has nice touches — the battle sequences, for instance, if you get grabbed by a dinosaur, and the look and the feel of the two groups of human combatants. Heck, I even liked some of the dialogue.

But the controls, the AI, and the save system leave a lot to be desired in a first person shooter in this day and age. Other games have really brought up the bar — it's not enough to be merely adequate anymore except to people who want to spend some time burning through a campaign that'll take twice as long as you expect thanks to the difficulty.