"A solid game with some novel concepts that could have been taken a lot further"

For me, the parts of a few shooters I've played over the recent years that have been the most fun have been the areas where you get to team up with AI-controlled teammates. Games like Half-Life: Opposing Force, Jedi Outcast, SWAT 3, and Operation Flashpoint all do this to an extent (the latter two especially), but I was under the impression that The Thing would have me tooling around with my very own unit of ass-kickers. It's a shame then that most of the game has you wandering around on your own after all the hype put into the extensive Trust/Fear System the game employs. Even once inside the game you're lead to believe that most of the game will take place alongside a few squad members (you begin the game with a full squad and the first level is basically an extensive tutorial teaching you how to interact with them), but on the very next level you're dropped off all by your lonesome.
A lot of the game is spent looking for other teammates (specifically engineers, who seem to be very plentiful, to open doors for you) and when you finally do find more guys to join up with they are either subjected to random or scripted ''bursts outs,'' meaning they've been infected, or you're just forced to leave them behind so you can progress to the next level. There's a few instances where you get to take your squad with you into the next level, and when you do get to do that the game is truly special. The squad AI is nearly perfect. The path-finding is impeccable, I only noticed maybe one spot where my dudes had trouble following me. Your soldiers shoot reasonably well, too, so you don't have to worry about getting a bullet in the back of the skull while you're fending off nasties. Engineers are pretty much essential to progressing, and medics are really helpful (maybe a little too much, since they can fully restore your health pretty much just by bumping into you), and I don't know what the soldier-class is good for since I only found two in the entire game. The Trust/Fear System is easy to get used to, since all you really have to do to get someone to trust you is give them a weapon. I never had to ''coerce'' anyone throughout the whole game. In any case, running around and blasting (a limited selection of) aliens with a full squad is truly a joy, there just isn't enough of it.
You might be wondering why I'm making such a big deal of having a squad of characters instead of just a single character. It's simply because there's nothing else like it out there. The Trust/Fear System is the perfect balance between baby-sitting and squad customization, and the squad AI is awesome. But the game probably would have had to have been totally redesigned to cater to it's strengths. It's just like the developers were halfway finished with the game when they realized what a cool squad system they had and didn't bother to go back and adapt the rest of the game to it. The boss battles are a perfect example of this, as most of the time you'll have a few guys with you all the way up until the point where you face the Big Thing of the area and then you'll just be shut off from them (or they ''burst out'' before you reach the door). Maybe they were trying to recreate the feeling of the final battle of the movie, but wouldn't it have been a lot cooler to fight one of those things in a bigger area using all your little soldier pals? In either case, the boss battles are tedious and frustrating.
Sadly, most of the time you'll be running around in dank, bland environments shooting at a few variations of Thingies using some pretty generic weapons. There's really no reason for the developers not to have included more enemy variations than they did. If they were worried about having too many and the player confusing one type of enemy for another, that would have been perfect for a game that's supposed to inspire a modicum of fear in you. And speaking of fear, only the first level is somewhat creepy (and you don't even fight any enemies there). After you start killing stuff, any spookiness the game could have elicited goes out the window since ammo is damn well plentiful throughout the entire game. Things are usually dispatched pretty easily, too, and really only present a threat when they're ganging up on you. Enemies that aren't Things are easily dispatched because of their slow reaction times.
Other than that, the voice-acting is pretty well-done (featuring William B. Davis, TV's The X-Files' Cancer-Man!), but its kind of silly that your squad members all have pretty much the same lines even though they were voiced by different voice-actors. Two completely different teammates may say ''We're gonna die here!'' exactly the same way but voiced by a different person and I can't think of any good reason why they'd need to do that. They should try ad-libbing. Some of the sound effects are kind of awkward in some places, too. But its nice to hear some of the music from the movie (well, those two notes on the bass) in the game. It helps make the game a little eerier in some places, but this game still isn't exactly Resident Evil.
The graphics are pretty good and the environments are reasonably detailed when you're not running down lifeless corridors or outside. The console-y control scheme has migrated suitably well to the PC, and the camera is superb (although it would be kind of hard for it not to be since the camera's glued to your back in 3rd person the entire game). The load times are nice and short and the fire effects look pretty keen, too. But some of the animation in the cutscenes syncs up somewhat awkwardly, and you can almost see the seam running down some of the characters faces from where they've been textured on one half and then copied to the other. That's just nitpicky stuff, though, and really doesn't affect the game any. But one thing that really bugs me is when explosion sprites aren't big enough and you run into them even when you think you've gone far enough out of the way to avoid them. This happens sometimes with the flamethrower, but happens waaay too much in one level in particular (the 'escape from the exploding building level' seems to be becoming the newest videogame cliche).
The Thing is definitely worth playing if you enjoy shooters, but if you're expecting a scare-fest or something new, don't bother. It's really frustrating to play a game like this where you can almost pinpoint the exact spot where the developers decided to take the game in a different direction than you wanted them too, and this is the case with the squad-based gameplay. The potential for something great and special is right there, but it seems that either deadline constraints or just blindness on behalf of Computer Artworks squandered it. Maybe an add-on or a game using the same Trust/Fear System could address these issues in the future. In the mean time, if you've ever wanted to play Half-Life with autoaim and without the jumping, here's your chance!

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/02, Updated 09/02/02