A great game based on a great movie.
The Thing is looks pretty impressive for a game that came out five years ago. Character models are detailed and sharp. The Things definitely stand-out. The Walkers are huge, terrifying and extensively detailed. The small Crawlers look appropriately disgusting and creepy. The enviroments also look great. Rooms filled with blood, guts and horribly mutilated corpses are common sights. The Thing, like the 1982 movie, doesn't shy away from violence. Heads will pop and bodies will explode into small, meaty pieces. Really, my only complaint about the graphics are the low-quality, blocky corpses which litter the rooms.
The Thing doesn't offer much in the form of a soundtrack, but that's not a problem. There are plenty of sound effects to make up for that. Your squadmates don't mind expressing their feelings towards the mission, taunting enemies, telling you where to go or comparing corpses to your former girlfriends. All the voices sound good, and you can clearly hear the frustration, fear or humor in the voices. My only complaint about the voice-acting is the abundance of "We got company!" That's pretty much the only thing your allies say when they spot enemies, and it gets old fast.
The gameplay is easily the best part of The Thing. It uses the familar squad mechanics you've used in other games, but with two big twists: fear and trust. When one of your squadmates sees a mutilated body or is involved in something scary, fear sets in. He'll usually vomit or wet himself, but if he is constantly exposed to this he'll begin to lose it. He'll shake uncontrollably, fire his weapon at nothing and, eventually, end his life. Once in the middle of a battle, my medic lost it and shot himself in the head. It was one of the coolest, most disturbing and most unexpected things I'd ever seen in a video game. When you take a squadmate's weapon, shot at him or don't attack enemies, your squadmate will lose trust in you. Usually when a squadmate loses trust in you he'll simply refuse to follow orders, but if you really piss him off he won't hesitate to fire on you.
Besides the trust/fear system, The Thing has a huge squad-system twist: your squadmates can turn into the Thing at anytime. Seeing someone who you thought was your friend suddenly transform into the Thing is sad, and you'll never really feel that you can trust anyone else. To counter this you can pick up blood-test kits, but these do little to expose infected squadmates. Your squadmate can pass the test, yet a little while later he'll turn into the Thing. This is my biggest complaint about The Thing. Not the possibility that your squadmates are infected, that's awesome, but the inconcistency with blood test kits.
Killing Things are also an experience in itself. They require a two-phase attack. The first is just shooting the hell out of it. This reduces it's health, but doesn't kill it. To finish off Things you'll have to burn them. This makes killing each Thing a challenge, and when you're ambushed by multiple Things you may just want to pause the game to think up a strategy.
Although it doesn't offer any multiplayer or much of any reason to play though again once you've beaten it, The Thing is a great survival-horror game that fans of the movie will love, and fans of games in general will love just as much.