The Thing

THE BAD:
Difficulty in exploration, lack of information on how to complete missions.

SUMMARY:
Anyone could be an alien.
Could be the guy in the next room, or the one standing next to you.
Or it could be YOU!
Just kidding... OR AM I?

Seriously though, The Thing had some great promise, but suffers from a few serious flaws.

To comment on the more positive aspects first, I will say that the premise of the movie was a great idea to translate to video game format.
You must be vigilant, and work to gain the trust of your squad members and that of the strangers you meet along the way, because they're just as paranoid as you are.
You can earn this trust by healing them, giving them weapons, or performing blood tests on yourself in front of them to prove you're not an alien.
You must be prepared, however, that all your hard work could very well be in vain, because though their fear and mistrust is totally convincing as a typical human, the instant a seven-foot monstrosity bursts out of their skin and comes after you, you'll know it was all bull pucky.

The battle sequences are exciting as well, and whenever you and/or your squad is attacked by aliens, the camera zooms slightly and changes to this nifty fish-eye perspective.
Your squad members will also act very realistically, darting from here to there, crouching, attacking, and shouting out various expletives.

Speaking of realism, your squad members will sometimes lose their lunch when they see a dead body, or become incredibly spooked and will require you to calm them down or remove them from the area in question that's freaking them out, otherwise they could very well want to off themselves out of pure fear.

However, one of the downsides to this game is that there are no readily available on-hand maps to speak of, just the occasional one posted to the wall that you'll either have to memorize or copy down on paper.
This makes exploration very tedious sometimes, because in the winter landscape, it's hard to tell where you are, where you're going, or where you've been, I can't tell you how many times I wandered around an area for ten minutes at a time cursing to myself, wondering what the frigg I was supposed to do next.
Not only that, but you can only be out in the cold dilly-dallying around for so long before your temperature drops to dangerous levels and you start losing health, so you must find a building or enclosure to take shelter in before you can go out again.

Though they give you direct verbal instructions most of the time as to how to complete your next mission, knowing how to do it is another matter entirely.
For example, in the first stage, you're ordered to drop C2 explosives in two key areas, but if like me, you assume you just need to be in the rooms and drop the explosives anywhere you please because you have no information to tell you otherwise, you're going to completely miss the translucent red squares on the wall where you're actually supposed to plant the C2.

The environments are a tad on the dull side, but I will forgive the decided lack of color due to the fact that you ARE exploring a remote winter wasteland.

In conclusion, this game again, had some great promise, and if it had been created for a next-gen console, I bet they could have worked out a lot of the bugs to create an even more fantastic title, but as it stands, you need a lot more patience than I do to get through it all.