The Thing: Remastered Review (Predator1981)
The Thing: Remastered 2024
As a big fan of the movie I was really excited to play the game for the first time. Due to the ridiculous German censorship, I didn’t play it when it came out back in 2002.
I know not many will feel like me and like the game a lot, which is totally understandable, but for myself the title was a big disappointment overall. I know everyone has different expectations, but mine were completely unfulfilled.
My playthrough was unveiling just a mediocre shooter game at the end and not a survival horror game, I would have expected from the core material. It started very strong, but turned out, that this shouldn’t be the way a proper movie adaptation should have been done.
I don’t even think that the Remaster is a good work overall in comparison to the high price and was done with modest efforts in my opinion.
Lets start with the good „things“ in The Thing. The look of it is fantastic. The graphics and especially the new lighting and shadows are phenomenal. Love the design (level, visualization, introduction) in the beginning and the many references to the movie. The game plays after the incident from the orginal classic from 1982. Nightdive Studios (which I admire a lot and thank them for bringing us many old games on modern systems) did an good job on the Remaster with new added parallels from the movie, they’ve extra implemented for the game.
While you get soaked into it for the first few hours, you also get kicked out of the „real Thing“ and the game becomes a not so well executed shooting gallery with hordes of enemies. I didn’t have that much fun overall and the horror completely vanished in the late progress.
Yes, a real survival horror game like Resident Evil (1996), Silent Hill (1999) or the later released Dead Space (2008) would be a better option for The Thing source material. While playing the Remaster there were very less horror and shock moments I would have expected from it. Also a lot of the mechanics (squad and mistrust system) were just superficial and had no real or even a deep impact on the game, which it’s movie template was all about. The people you meet there do not matter at all and a lot of them will just die, decided by the game itself, no matter what you try. It looked fine in the beginning, but after a while you will encounter that for yourself. The behaviour is rudimentary and nothing special even for the time 2002. When I think about the AI in Splinter Cell, which was released in the same year, it showed what systems were possible back then.
The design of the end game was also terribly executed. Just waves of stupid enemies thrown to the player, which you mow down with lots of ammo even Rambo would be envious. There was no tension at all. So if you decide to do a shooter game, it should be done well. The AI is beyond stupid (friends and foes) but at least it will give you a lot of laughs with some moments of anger.
But the the biggest let down was the poor sound execution. There’s nothing more iconic than the theme of Ennio Morricone. Besides some very short snippets of music there’s literally no good audio in the game at all, which could have created some tension. There are almost no ambient sounds at all. Sometimes you might think the game is muted if you don’t move and listen to the monotonous footsteps. With good audio, which is most important to create atmosphere in a game, this could be a much better experience.
This game shouldn’t cost what it does and it’s for sure overpriced. If you want to get it, then wait for a sale. The Remaster perfectly fits to modern Triple A games, where graphics are everything. Yes, The Thing needs a proper Remake instead of a poor Remaster like this one. This is my personal opinion and my feelings about this project. It’s not the worst game ever, but a game which wasn’t necessary in this execution.