The Thing: Remastered Review (Xbox Series X|S)

Here's the thing about The Thing Remastered; it's still very much 2002's The Thing. Which is either a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on how much you like your The Thing.

2002's The Thing, you see, which is based on the intensely sexy Kurt Russell movie, The Thing, (itself based on a novella that isn't called The Thing!) is a real mixed bag of a game. It sets its stall out very impressively, digging into the creeping fear and slowly rising paranoia of the classic movie, giving you some light squad control and presenting its tale in environs that - whilst certainly aged - still absolutely nail the vibe of the whole thing (didn't even mean that one) perfectly well. But it also falls apart quite badly for the second stretch of its slight running time.

Let's stick with the positives for now, though. This is a game that's always had its presentation nailed down, and that side of the experience only gets better with the maestros at Nightdive on remastering duties. This is a slick and crisp revisit to 1980's Antartica. It controls perfectly, it's got motion-controls, fully mappable options for your controller settings and sensitivities, and all the nips and tucks you'd expect to ensure that you're getting the original vision, presented as well as it can be.

The graphics have been all dickied up a belter for this re-run, with flashier character models and cleaned-up textures. Nightdive has even hand-crafted some bespoke animations and updated lighting and atmospheric effects. So you got all that sweet volumetric bejizzle now, too. Which is great!

The result is a supremely impressive feat on a technical level. It runs perfectly at up to 4K/120FPS, feeling smooth as a hideously mutated baby's bottom to play as it does so and, for the first two or three hours it's actually well worth settling into. Even now, some twenty two years down the line, it holds your attention in a strong start that asks you to use your brain a little as you band together against the elements, solve some smart puzzles, and get all wrapped up in the suspense of gaining the trust of your comrades, whilst also getting to indulge in some sweaty moments from the movies - which we won't spoil here, just in case.

All of this early doors stuff is great. It was great back in the day, and it's still fun now. Especially when it looks and feels this nice. However, and it's a big one, unfortunately, this is also a game that sort of falls flat on its ass for its second half. It's not an uncommon situation, giving in to the temptation to add lots of guns and things to shoot them with, but it really stings quite a bit here, as if they'd just stuck to being quietly inventive - without all the shooting - we were 40% of the way to an all-time horror classic. Oh well.

Once the guns come out, once the bigger enemies arrive and the worm turns to a rather shoddy attempt at blockbuster action, it just never recovers. This was just about 7/10 stuff back at the time, if you were really into the movie. Now, two decades later, and even with a very skillful remaster to show off its best bits, it's a hard thing to recommend to anyone other than avid fans of the source material, or those of us who have fond memories of playing the original.

The shooting feels bad, no matter the new controls. It's a messy experience at its core, and in these stretches of always-poor, and now badly-aged, action - which entirely take over as it rolls into the final third - the game totally loses the run of itself. There's no silver lining. Once the wheels start to come and it errs on the side of shooting bland enemies over revelling in its uniquely atmospheric fear/trust system, it's toast as a thing you'll want to spend time with.