User Rating: 7.3 | The Thing XBOX
By katman | Review Date:
A good game, almost great, that is very bloody, and frustratingly hard - almost crossing over into being un-fun to play it's so hard. The Thing reminded me of another game for the Xbox, Conflict Dessert Storm, with almost the same horrible and illogical controls, similar character animations, and poor and confusing design decisions; but yet at the same time being very addicting and fun to play with a can't wait to see what happens next type of gameplay that I just couldn't put down. I have to say I really enjoyed playing this game, except for brief moments when I was very frustrated with it. While at heart it was your basic 3rd-person shooter with a survival horror theme, it had the added twist of not knowing when your squad-mates would turn against you and become one of the monsters they were just shooting at. The overall story was also pretty good, if only a little unbelievable that there would be this huge underground outpost (with trucks!?!) in the Antarctic. The graphics were pretty good, but did get a little choppy sometimes. They did a great job at making me feel I was at some desolate Antarctic station. The surround sound was excellent, with no music at all except maybe a chord whenever a dramatic event happened - which was ok with me! It was well keeping in the cold Antarctic atmosphere to be as quiet as possible except for the howling wind and crunching snow - very cool. The gameplay was very hard - even on the "easy" level you still fight wave after wave of enemies and end up dying a LOT. Three main points brought the overall gameplay score down for me (and frustration up). 1) Horrible and Confusing Controls - you can pick from 3 different schemes, and all suck in their own way. I ended up with scheme C that reminded me most of Halo, but you'll still be fighting with the controls and hitting the wrong button at the worst possible time because it doesn't make too much sense what they picked. 2) Horrible Squad-Mate AI - I was endlessly reloading my game as these idiots would get themselves killed over and over again for the most idiotic reasons. 3) Horrible Save System - They used a check-point system where you could save as often as you liked at the checkpoint, unfortunatly a lot of these checkpoints were far between, meaning replaying over and over the same parts when you got killed - BORING! My Xbox has a hard-drive and I want to save and reload at anytime from anyplace!! Also there is no replay value that I see - it's pretty much a straight path thru the game, and once it's over I had no intention of replaying it. With all that said, I think I only paid like $20 for this game, and it was definitely worth it! I even went out and bought the movie on DVD to watch again as I hadn't seen it in 10 years - still pretty good, and makes the ending of the game even that much more interesting! Enjoy!

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