It might have created the survival horror genre back on the PC in the 1990s, but time nonetheless demands more of a brand new Alone In The Dark than Atari has delivered here. For in spite of some smart set pieces, Capcom is hardly sweating over the threat to its Resident Evil saga posed by the return of one of its old rivals.

Still, Alone In The Dark isn't too bad, and it certainly gets off to a fast start. Stuck in a room and about to be killed, a strange creature gives you your chance to escape and triggers a collection of interesting, pacey sequences and set pieces that hasten your arrival in Central Park, where the bulk of the game is set (and the true secrets lie).

There's an unpleasant secret lying in wait there, which won't be spoilt here, and a fair number of foes who would quite happily send you to your death. And at its best these encounters are fun, occasionally a little creepy and well presented.

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They're also, no matter how tricky you find them, quite easy to bypass, as a result of a DVD playback-style feature. This has been implemented by Atari so that any player can, if they choose, jump to any point of the game and play from there, no matter if they've beaten the challenges that lead to said moment or not.

We can see the advantage there: after all, how many games do people generally bother to get to the end of, and not see everything there is to offer? But it does seem to build in a legalised cheat, and to some people will remove the incentive to battle through the game's tougher moments.

And those tougher moments aren't helped by a troubling control system that offers you the chance to switch between a first and third person viewpoint. This, however, adds extra hassle to the game, that's compounded by a troubled camera and the need for precision at the point you least seem able to get it. It's a muddled system and it rips some of the fun out of the game outright.

On the plus side, there are some interesting innovations. The idea of being able to combine objects to create something more useful has been done before, and it works well again here. This sprinkles some extra dust on the decent combat mechanism, and mixed in with some fine graphical work, the guts of the game prove to be quite tasty.

Yet sadly, it's not enough. Compared to the polished-to-gleaming-point later Resident Evil games, Alone In The Dark has nowhere near enough in its locker to convince you to switch sides. For every good set piece - and there are many - there's something else annoying, or there's another battle with the controls to get through. And the sad fact is that you'll end up using that DVD jump system for the wrong reasons: not because you're interested in exploring the game, rather that it's a lot less hassle than battling it.

Flashes of brilliance, flashes of frustration. It's nice to see Alone In The Dark back, but it'll have to do better to compete in the modern world.