5-Oct-2002 Man is the warmest place to hide apparently.
What happened to the airing cupboard,
asks Steve O'Hagan?
The Antarctic is a hostile place. Temperatures that can freeze tears before they leave your eyes. Winter nights that seemingly never end. Freezing winds that can cause frostbite in minutes and bury buildings in snow drifts in a matter of hours. Blizzards that can cut radio communications and prevent the use of any vehicles whatsoever. You'd be excused for thinking it couldn't get any more inhospitable. But you'd be wrong. Very wrong. There's something buried deep in the ice in the Antarctic, something that's been there for millennia. Something that arrived from a distant world. Something very weird. And very pissed off. The last thing anyone wanted to do was to thaw it out. Which is exactly what a team of Norwegian scientists did when they discovered it. And not only was it the last thing they wanted to do, it was pretty much the last thing they did. Horrific Antarctic conditions and an abominable creature from outer space. This is the deadly double-act you've got to deal with in The Thing. That and a team of so-called buddies who are liable to panic, get taken over by The Thing, or just shoot you in the back when they stop trusting you. The game plays in third person and is something of a third-person action/adventure/survival horror number. You are Blake, leader of one of several special forces teams deployed to investigate the catastrophe that's hit the base. The game opens as you and your squad land at the now devastated US base. It's only a matter of hours since the movie ended. What, you haven't seen the movie? Sort your life out, but for now have a look at the Sightseeing box to get up to date.
COLD AS ICE It doesn't take you long to work out the shit has hit the fan. The whole place is a smouldering ruin. There are corpses and trails of gore strewn about. And to make matters worse a storm has whipped up, cutting off communications between the squads and with HQ. As the insertion helicopter pulls away, the first thing you have to contend with out in the darkness of the snowstorm is the extreme cold. Spend too long out there and your health starts plummeting along with the temperature. Fortunately, duck under even the flimsiest of cover and you immediately warm up. Looking round the base confirms that The Thing is a fine looking game - up to a point. The character models are intricately detailed, the lighting effects create plenty of atmosphere, and the snow billows convincingly around you as you trudge through the fresh powder outside. But in other areas, it lets itself down. Shadows are cast into thin air when you perch on elevated platforms. The camera jumps around when you navigate enclosed spaces. And it's easy to trigger a graphical glitch with all manner of limbs and appendages disappearing through walls when you get too close.
INTO THE FIRE In a game touted as the scariest thing to have happened on a PC, what you really want to see is The Thing. Or rather The Things. And it's not long before they start coming thick and fast. Starting with little cockroach-like heads and legs that come at you in waves, building to man-sized hunks of dripping gore that refuse to die. In the film, Kurt Russell and co have barely any weapons bar some flame-throwers to deal with the extra-terrestrial menace. Not so here. As well as flamers, your boys are packing submachine guns, shotguns and grenades. Using these to waste the little scuttling things is a fairly easy task. Just point in their general direction and let auto-targeting do the rest, or switch to first-person and do the aiming yourself. Alternatively, leave them to your squad members who will fire automatically - and accurately - of their own accord. But the bigger manifestations are a different matter. We're talking the shambling atrocities that imitate humans and other, larger life-forms. These brutes don't die until they've been weakened with normal weapons and then burnt to a cinder with a flamer or an incendiary grenade.
SUPPORTING ACTORS Supporting each other in fire-fights is only the tip of the iceberg as far as team interaction goes. Your squad can include a medic for healing the others, an engineer to repair electrical items, and a soldier for general ass-kicking. You can never directly control any of your compadres, only issue them orders and hope for the best. The list of commands is far from daunting with 'follow me', 'stay here', 'take this', 'repair that' being pretty much it. The only things they do of their own accord is shoot and mutter stuff like 'This mission is bullshit", from time to time. While it's all very well barking orders at your buddies, what if they suddenly stop trusting you, thinking you've been infected by The Thing? Or what if they simply panic and start crapping themselves in mortal terror? Above the heads of each character appear floating icons showing their changing mental state. Force one guy to give you his gun and he'll lose some trust. Don't fire at the aliens when they attack and he'll lose more. As your team-mates' trust in you decreases they'll stop listening to you, and even start shooting you when they become convinced you are an alien. What can you do to convince them otherwise? Well, you could give them a gun or some ammo. Kill some of The Things. Take a bloodtest with one of the testing kits you find around to prove you're still a member of the human race. Or even stun them with a stun gun until you get the opportunity to prove you're still human.
THE ONLY THING TO FEAR Trust works both ways, and when you encounter a wandering trooper you have to ask yourself: is this guy all he seems. Because the last thing you want to happen when you're under assault from legions of scuttling xenomorphs is for the guy covering your back to start vomiting blood from his eyes and turn into a six-foot killing machine. See the Missed Opportunity panel for more on this. Your other major problem is when your troops start panicking. If they're unarmed, trudging through the snow in the darkness outside and stumble upon a dismembered corpse, you can forgive them for starting to lose it. Again, giving them a weapon can help. Or a quick injection with the adrenaline hypo can temporarily give them the bollocks they need to follow your orders again. A great idea, all this squad interaction and the whole psychological malarkey. But sadly it seems to be a little half-hearted. For one, in most cases you can complete your tasks without too much bother alone, even if your fellows die. And for another, typically you barely notice their changing psychological states. As long as you keep them armed and don't shoot them in battle, they should keep their shit together. As far as combat tactics go, all you do is stand near each other and hope for the best as there are too few options in what orders you need to give to offer some kind of tactical subtlety. And the oversimplified scissors/ paper/stone nature of the trust and panic systems means it's often less of a challenge to manage squad members' moods than it is a hassle.
THE THING IS... The game stays movie-like all the way through with its frequent use of cut-scenes to keep you in the picture and set up your next mission goal. These are all powered by the game engine so they're not the best looking and many of the cuts are slightly haphazard, leaving you wondering where the hell you are when they finish. One minute you're leaving a building with your pal, the next you're standing by another structure, alone, not knowing where you are, how you got there and why you're carrying a submachine gun and not a flamethrower. The main disappointment to fans of the film, though, will be the creatures themselves. The Thing in the movie looked like Satan had vomited a man-sized pile of offal and body parts. The Things here in the game look like little computer game monsters. While they've tried hard to model their creatures on the various incarnations of the film, it gets a little lost in the translation, and what was awesomely horrific has become a little bog-standard. Similarly, the bleak desolate arctic location provided the movie with the perfect sense of isolation and claustrophobia. But in a game it can all get repetitive and even bland. They've done their best to improve upon this by adding many locations that weren't visited in the movie, but one deserted snow-bound arctic installation looks pretty much like another. In the end, The Thing has plenty of good ideas. It tries hard to be more than yet another average third-person actioner. And though it is gripping for a while, at the end of the day it doesn't all gel together as well as it could have. It's not scary enough to work as a classic 'horror' game, it's not action packed enough to work as a top-notch shooter, and it's not tactical enough to pass as any kind of strategy game. We hoped for a classic genre-bending fright-fest. As it is, it's just another good film spin off.
Steve O'Hagan
// Overview
Verdict
Great licence, good game
Uppers
Draws on awesome raw material Interesting squad system Chilly, isolated atmosphere
Downers
Jack of all trades, not quite master of any Locations become repetitive Can't match the atmosphere of the film
Like a beaming tourist with a camera, we went in search of bits from the film that are in the game
If you haven't seen the movie The Thing, here's what happens. Norwegian scientists dig up an alien frozen in the ice near an Antarctic research station. Which is not a good idea considering it's a blood-crazed shape-shifting killer that can imitate any life-form it encounters. The creature moves on to a US base and kills everyone, but then Kurt Russell blows the whole place up. For those of you who have had the cinematic pleasure, you'll be keen to see what locations and characters have made the transition from movie to game.
The US camp in the movie has burnt down by the time you get there, but you can still make out locations from the film among the rubble.
Early on the squad stumbles upon Childs' body, but it's alone! Where the hell did MacReady get to?
The mini-space ship The Thing builds when isolated as Blair in the shack is still there to be seen.
The odd moment brings it all flooding back such as when you have to blood test members of the squad to see if anyone's infected.
// Wild Thing
The movie monster scared us witless. The game didn't
There's a moment in the movie where one of the guys utters a line that just summed up how incredibly grotesque the special effects on the creatures were, especially considering it was way back in 1982. It's just after the doctor has had his arms ripped off at the elbow when a disembodied head sprouts little crab legs and starts scuttling off. One of the team catches it in the corner of his eye and says: "You've got to be fucking kidding." Quite. It seems the film that shocked cinema audiences 20 years ago and cemented The Thing's place as the best horror movie of all time in more than one of the ZONE team's minds doesn't have anywhere near the same effect now on PC. In fact, the beasties on show here just seem a little tame in comparison.
Scuttling head-on-legs Things are the standard incarnation you'll come up against. Though fast, they don't take much killing.
A 'walker' is like The Thing Kurt Russell shouts "fuck you" at before blowing it up and the end of the movie. That lad's got a stinging tongue.
When your team members start foaming at the mouth and wailing like
a banshee, expect a transformation into your standard humanoid version of the beast.
// Missed Opportunity
We wanted rampant paranoia, we got rampant scripting
In the film, the characters and the audience are never sure who The Thing is. In the game you aren't either, but this could have played a far greater role in proceedings. The trouble is threefold. Firstly, it's no great shakes when someone's infected as they are easy to roast with a flamer. Secondly, these events are purely scripted so even if you use a blood-test kit on your pal to clear him of suspicion, you can turn the next corner and before you know it his arms fall off, his eyes pop out and he's shaking like a shitting dog. Both of these factors contribute to the third problem which is the lack of incentive to care or bother to find out whether one of your pals is infected in the first place. Think about it: a) it's easy to kill him when he changes; b) they will change at a set moment regardless of what you do and the test kit doesn't work anyway; and c) you might as well have him around to help out in the fire-fights until the pre-ordained moment that he does change. Which all sucks.
Losing a mate to the beast is no great shake.
// Second Opinion
Kurt Russell must be turning in his grave, reckons Anthony Holden
The Thing is a great film, that much we've established. And hugely fertile material for a game, too. Or at least that's what I thought before I started playing; very soon into the opening scenes I started having second thoughts. This happened at about the same time I was bombarded by the first in a long series of horrible text-heavy instruction screens. The information in them is pretty vital to how the game works, but presented in such a clumsy and archaic way that I simply couldn't bear to plough through it all. Things didn't really pick up after that, and pretty soon I was starting to rather dislike the film as well. Sure, the need to monitor the psychology of your team-mates is a cool idea, but heavy reliance on scripting and needless dumbing-down really lets the concept down. There are plenty of good things to be said about this game, and if you've got a bit more patience than me you might have a laugh with it, but as far as I'm concerned it's a disappointment. Maybe they should have tried their hand at Overboard instead.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Draws on awesome raw material
