"Game Over Whitley!"

In 1982 a horror movie came out called The Thing. I've never seen it but I've heard that it was pretty good but the ending left people wanting a sequel. Now 20 years later, a videogame comes out which is the closest thing to a sequel that will probably ever come out. While the game doesn't answer some questions about the movie, it does explain a bit about what happened to The Things after the events in the movie.

Story

Your the leader of a military rescue squad sent to investigate what had happened to an American scientific outpost in Antarctica. The base was attacked and destroyed by an alien life form known as The Things. They infected most of the people they killed at the base and now you must stop the infection from becoming a global infection. The entire story isn't really explained in the game so you'd have to see the movie to see what happened before the game.

Gameplay

The Thing is an action game played in 3rd person view. It's looks like a horror game but plays more like an action game. What makes The Thing different from other games like it is your squad. You can control people that join you when you find them. Your team can be up to 4 people, but I don't think there is any ties in the game when you'll have that many people. Guys that you find are one of three classes. They can be a solider, an engineer or a medic. Each class has special things that only they can do. A medic has an unlimited supply of health packs and will heal you or someone else from the team automatically when injured. An engineer can repair advanced electrical boxes that you can't and soldiers fight the best.

To make things a little more interesting, a lot of guys that you find won't trust you when they first see you. They might think your infected because an infected person can look human but change into a Thing at any moment. There's many things you can do to gain their trust. Your going to have to gain their trust because if they don't trust you enough then they won't listen to you or follow you and you'll need some of them. Killing some bigger Things in front of them gains trust, giving them a gun or ammo gains trust, using a blood test kit on yourself to prove your human also gains trust. If you can't get them to trust you, then you can use coercion. Coercion is when you point a gun at their head and hold it there for a few seconds to get them to listen to you. This will work but they will trust you less and they may try to trick you.

If a team member has no trust in you and you shoot them, they will start to see you as an enemy. When they see you as an enemy, they will attack you. Sometimes their pretty smart and will attack you when you turn your back to them. You can see how a teammate is feeling by icons that appear over their head. Numerous different icons appear at times tell you stuff. There is icons showing how scared they are, how much they trust you, if they spotted an enemy, if they need health and so on. You should try to keep your squad in good health with high trust and clam. Many times a member will get scared if your in a bloody room with bodies and stuff. If they to scared they won't listen to you and they'll crack up. They'll go into a corner, kneel down and sit there for a while. It's pretty funny when they have a heart attack and die from being scared. When they walk past a body sometimes they will look at it and throw up on it which is pretty cool.

There is also times when you shouldn't trust members of your squad. A lot of the people you get will turn out to be infected. When you get to a certain spot with them if they grab their head and start moving around a lot then they are turning into a Thing and you'll have to kill them. The only way to find out if there a thing is to use a blood test kit on them, it will real if their human or not.

Blake gets to use a pretty good arsenal of weapons throughout the game. You can find a pistol, machine gun, shot gun, sniper rifle, grenade launcher, flame thrower, blow torch and 4 different kinds of grenades. You can also get many items like flares, health packs, fire extinguishers, keys, blood test kits and so on. Since you can only hold a certain amount of items, it's a good idea to keep your guys equipped with a gun. Machine guns and pistols are the best to give to your teammates.

The game doesn't offer much for puzzles and is mostly just killing stuff. You'll often have to find electrical boxes to turn on lights or unlock doors. Sometimes you'll have to find an access code to unlock a door. This is done sometimes by find a control panel for a video camera. There is many video cameras on walls you can control when you find a switch. Sometimes there used for getting access codes but mostly just to see what's in the room. There is also a machine gun equipped on some of them which can be useful for weakening bigger Things before you get in the room.

There isn't much of a variety of Things to fight. You get a few different looking small Things that just jump at you or spit green stuff to slow you down. Those can be killed easily with any weapon. The bigger Thing beasts are a different story. You'll have to weaken them with like a machine gun or shotgun and then use a flame thrower or a flame grenade to kill them because bigger beast can only e killed by fire. Since the flamethrower doesn't have a long range, you'll have to be careful when using it on them because if there running towards you then you can easily be lit on fire to. You should try to keep the bigger beasts away from your squad because they can do a lot of damage to them with a few slashes.

Throughout the game you'll fight three Thing bosses (not including the last boss). They can be pretty tough and require strategy. You'll have to weaken them with a gun then burn them like other Things but they are a lot stronger. Boss battles are about the only battles that really require strategy.

To aid in stealth or taking out enemies from a distance, Blake has a few techniques he can use. You can go into first person view but you won't be able to walk around, you'll just stand still. To peak around a corner, you can lean to the side a little bit when in first person view. Those don't help in combat but are good for stealth.

The Thing also has some of the best AI I've seen for a while. Both humans and Things are really smart. There's the whole trust/fear thing I explained a while ago, humans won't follow your orders if your acting weird or they don't trust you. They also aren't stupid in combat, they will back away from approaching things and sometimes they will take cover. The Things are pretty smart to. If your shooting fire at them, they'll back away and won't come at you until the fire in their path is gone. If their weak they might run away from you and hide. Things tend to try to get away from grenades as well.

Graphics

The Thing looks really good. All the people and things are pretty detailed. Sniping in on a bigger thing allows you to see just how detailed it is. The veins and body parts attached to it look really cool. All the blood and gore around bodies on the ground looks great. The textures look pretty good as well. The people actually look pretty real even up close. You also won't find that all your guys look the same because each guy to go along with their different names, will have a different face. Mostly every one of the same class wears the same clothes but all have different faces. The Things can also look different. They'll have different parts of humans in them and stuff.

Sound

All the sounds are cool. The guns shots and everything sounds great. The voices are all really cool to. Each person has a different voice so you won't be hearing the same voices over and over again. Teammates will shout various things during combat to let you know what's going on with them. There will also be times in the game when you'll need to listen for Things or other enemies. I never paid much attention to the music but most of its creepy sounding. A lot of parts don't have music in the game anyway but occasionally you'll hear some. The game also has a pretty cool song from the rock band Saliva during the credits. The song is called "After Me" and it's great. The back of the case says the song in the game like its some big thing but you'll only hear it at the credits, and the sound quality of it sucks.

Final Comments

The Thing is crazy and you should buy it if you like action/horror games.

Year of Release: 2002
Developer: Computer Artworks
Console: Xbox
Genre: Action/Horror
1 Player

Final Rating: 8.7/10