We would love to have been a fly on the wall for Capcom's Dino Crisis 3 concept meeting. Dinosaurs may well be sexy in a 'Mother Nature's best ever killing machine' style, but one thing they're not is versatile. There are only so many scenarios that'll work with 30 tons of muscle and teeth. A secret research lab on a tropical island was covered in the first game. And through clever time-travel tactics allowing for more lush jungle environments and a switch in gameplay styles from flight to fight, it was also addressed in the more successful sequel.

So for the third (and Xbox-exclusive) instalment there must have been a fair bit of head scratching over at Capcom's HQ. Hatching another Dino clone just wouldn't do - not for the more demanding Xbox audience. Something new needed to happen. Something that would add a new level of depth to the franchise, something to make this game stand head and shoulders above what's gone before and cement Dino Crisis 3 as the benchmark in arcade adventure. Something big. “No worries!” cries Capcom''s top head-scratcher. “We'll put the whole thing in space - like Aliens crossed with Godzilla! Just think of the fun we can have amongst the stars!" Alrighty then...

So with space travel in mind, the Dino Crisis saga fast-forwards to the distant future. The year is 2548 and after taking a 300-year wrong turn, a colony ship mysteriously re-emerges without any trace of inhabitants. Hardly surprising considering that centuries of decomposition would result in flesh and bone resembling little more than a Salt 'n' Shake sachet. You play Patrick, a Marine heading up a salvage mission to investigate the mysterious goings-on aboard the Ozymandius. But just as your boarding party prepares to go and explore the abandoned ship, a self-defence mechanism kicks into life and promptly destroys your vessel, colleagues and ticket home.

Through the handy use of a jetpack (an item that features strongly throughout the game), our hero manages to escape the stricken shuttle and navigate his way to the ship's hangar where the adventure proper begins. This entails a bloody big dinosaur chomping one of the few survivors in half before itself becoming prey to an army of slugs with teeth. Seeing is believing, and fortunately thanks to some of the very best cutscenes ever to grace a game, we believed again and again and again. The opening cinematics are everything they should be for this genre: brutal, frightening and jaw-droppingly spectacular. It's just a shame the game doesn't follow suit. Yes you've read it right, we're giving the lead review a critical dig in the ribs by paragraph four - all does not bode well for our dino friends.

The gameplay is almost entirely ship-based - a humongous floating complex that, just to make life easier, can change its shape (and subsequent access points) through activating various engineering consoles. So yup, you've guessed it - we're back in familiar survival horror gameplay mode and the songsheet goes like this. Discover you need to go to location A, but you can't get there because it lies behind a locked door that requires a security pass. The room that holds the security pass (location B) can't be accessed without changing the ship formation. Find the room with the console to change the formation (invariably miles from where you need to go). Make your way to location B to find security pass, before being locked in and faced with destroying a wave of respawning dinosaurs. Pick up keycard, go back to the start of the map to unlock the original door to get you to location A. Get treated to a cutscene to reward you for your efforts, before going through the whole process again. Only this time it takes even longer because as you unlock further sections of the ship, you'll continually need to backtrack to make progress. One step forward, two steps back - the gameplay in a nutshell and excuse us while we curl up in the corner because it's the same tired old formula that we've seen countless times before.

If we sound cynical we make no apologies. We're at the point of pad-chucking frustration that the promise of what could have been a potential classic is overshadowed by design flaws that put the 'slop' in 'sloppy'. It's not the run-of-the-mill gameplay that's the biggest offender in this title - that's a forgivable by-product of the genre. What's really got our blood boiling is the camera which does everything it possibly can to ruin the experience. Dino Crisis 3 camerawork is on the Raspberry award shortlist for all-time worst camera in a 3D game. It's up there with Batman: Dark Tomorrow. It's. That. Bad.

You continually find yourself shooting directly into the camera, meaning you're looking at your character rather than whatever he's shooting at. This is of absolutely no discernible use when trying to fight dinosaurs who can clobber you with a flick of their tails, or when you need to make an acrobatic leap onto a ledge you can hardly see. You do get a first-person viewpoint by clicking the Right thumbstick, but the developer in its infinite wisdom has made this view static so you can shoot but you can't move. Nice one, Capcom.

Other camera cardinal sins include a fixed-position view where your character will change direction as he runs across the screen. Just what you need when you're having a hard enough time running around a ship that for the large part looks all too similar.

But if you can put the formulaic gameplay and disastrous camera to one side then perhaps, just perhaps, there's a decent enough game to play. And if you dig deep enough there is. The dinosaurs look good, albeit somewhat skinless - no doubt pushing the point that these are extra-terrestrial dinos and not the common or garden Jurassic types. The beasties benefit from some great animation and some surprisingly good AI where they'll follow you up platforms and over boxes to keep you on your toes; and the tense minimalist soundtrack has been learnt from the Silent Hill School of Music - meaning a little can go a long way.

Character control is also pretty slick - especially with the added jetpack. You can now navigate the vertical as well as the traditional horizontal, so much more of the map is open for exploration. But combat is largely a hit and hope affair. Auto-aim is the name of the game, which is probably all for the best considering most of the time you can't see the enemy - even if they are two feet from your face. You can actually aim in first-person but, as we said earlier, you can't move, so we guess you won't be doing it very often.

As it stands, Dino Crisis 3 just doesn't make the grade of premium arcade adventures. Good-looking visuals and big-budget cutscenes are all well and good, but when combined with amateur camerawork and wrapped up inside repetitive gameplay, the overall review score starts to sink quicker than a T-Rex in a tar pit. There's a half-decent title in there somewhere, but it'll need to be excavated from its fossil by gamers that don't want to see this franchise face extinction.

Power
There are quick loads on entering each room and no slowdown when dinosaurs go mental.

Style
If the actual game matched the quality of the cutscenes we'd be campaigning for a cinema release.

Immersion
To enjoy this game you need to enjoy wrestling - with the camera at least.

Lifespan
Get past the problems and there's a big game to explore - but you'll need buckets of patience.

Summary
Big dinos can't hide the big problems lurking in this game. An average Xbox debut for this long-running series.

1. Nice-looking dinos
2. A huge ship to explore
3. Atmospheric sound

1. Camera is bad
2. Repetitive gameplay
3. Auto-aim takes the fun out of shooting