Review by: Tuxxer

The time has come to laud the praises of the kick-ass-ingest game I've played in a damn good long while. Check out the cursing, you know I must be serious. This game rocks on so many levels it boggles the mind.

What a surprise, this game I love so much is based on a movie. John Carpenter's 1982 suspense thriller The Thing, in itself a remake of sorts (barely) of a monster flick of a few decades earlier.

The game picks up where the movie left off. You and your team are at an abandoned research site in the Antarctic. The buildings are a shambles, most people are dead or missing, and if you spend too much time out of doors you'll freeze to death. You're not working alone, however. Half the suspense of the movie came not from waiting for the monster to show, but in wondering who it was. The Thing is a shape-shifter, and can take over the bodies of anyone in your team before you know it.

The A.I. controlling your teammates is beyond sweet. They'll follow orders, but only under optimum conditions. If you leave them alone for too long, borrow their ammo, or get lost and find them again, they're likely to think you've been changed. Trust is as important an aspect of the game as health. If things are going well, they'll do pretty much anything you want. Repair the electrical systems, fix you or your other teammates up, shoot the little critters all to hell.

Speaking of the little critters. The Things come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and it's your job to blow them all away. The small rodent-sized ones are bad enough. Fast, wiry, and if they bite your teammates they'll potentially change into full-sized monsters. Fire is the only thing that will finish off monsters of human-size or bigger. And they do get bigger.

But wait, there's more! You and your team of operatives have arrived on the scene of an already crappy situation. It's cold, dark, supplies are limited, bad guys are potentially everywhere, and oh yeah, one other thing. The walls are caked with blood. The Things got hungry, and ripped most of the remaining humans to pieces, which are scattered about the terrain of the game. You may be able to handle it, having mastered such titles as Evil Dead: A Fistful o' Boomstick and the Resident Evil series, but your teammates are sadly under-qualified. If they see too much gore, get attacked too often, or run out of precious, precious ammo, they may go into shock. They grow paranoid, get the shakes, and will begin shooting at anything that moves. Namely, you. Fortunately, a shot of adrenalin will calm them down, but the medical supplies needed to test your crew for Thing-ness and keep them under control are few and far between. Use sparingly.

Like any good shoot 'em up, you’ll require save stations. They come in the form of tape recorders (like the one used by Kurt Russell in the flick) to record your latest doom-filled report. "I may die, so it'll help the next person to come along to find out just how deep in poo and mutating postules they really are" kinda stuff. Save often, and don't save over your other games, you never know.

Now the game provides a number of challenges. Certain doors are locked, certain operatives require you to perform tasks before they'll provide their all-too-necessary assistance, etc. It's challenging, and it's great fun. However, you can only control so many teammates.

Once they've completed their task and it's time to move on to the next level, it may not be long before they transform into hideous monsters before your very eyes. It's times like this that a good old-fashioned mercy killing doesn't seem so out of the question. On at least one occasion, I saved the game, had a partner turn on me thirty seconds later, and have to put him down. I reloaded the save point, and simply shot him in the head to get rid of 'im. They're much harder to kill once they change.

Speaking of hard to kill; there are, as in any good shoot 'em up game, the bosses. At the end of some damned-hard levels wait creatures that defy description without getting too gross. In the movie, a dog mutated until it was the size of a small car, grew some extra limbs/heads, and began attacking the poor humans. In the game, the bosses are even larger, more disgusting, and harder to kill.

I loved this frickin' game. Seriously. Heaven knows I spent all too many hours in front of the X-Box when I should have been, oh, I don't know, sleeping instead. I give The Thing a 10 out of 10. It's a great first/third person shooter, the tension is very realistic, and the AI for your coworkers is unbelievable. Go rent this game, or buy it cheap, the price has come down remarkably in recent months ($20 on Amazon.com). And rent the movie while you're at it. It's pretty damn good too.

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