The Thing starts pretty interestingly but about halfway through begins to quickly lose steam. A lot of the fantastic ideas the game started with (managing a squad of different talents, the trust system, the potential for any of your teammates to be assimilated, the cold system) just aren't super important midway through the game anymore and it transitions into a very average third-person shooter for the time. It's not bad at any point (except for the awful boss fights). Still, it just eventually descends into TPS tedium and thing creatures even become a secondary enemy type compared to the human soldiers. The story has a few interesting concepts (like someone willingly infecting themselves) but otherwise feels kind of disappointingly nonexistent past the halfway point. Visually, the game is pretty on par with what was expected at the time. Environments are sufficiently detailed and there seems to have been a decent amount of thought put into the actual layout of each building. Character models look a bit behind the times, resembling Half-Life models but with slightly more geometry, but the high-resolution textures lend them a bit more realism. The cinematography, admirably, has more thought put into it than most games of the era. All of this goes out the window, however, midway through the game, when the creative environments and level layouts eventually decent into bland metal corridors with very little variety, hardly even letting you see the snow. The game could also heavily benefit from any sort of soundtrack to enhance the atmosphere, with the game only resorting to short little stingers during dramatic moments. This game had a lot of potentials and starts strong, but it just kind of fizzled out and maybe needed a sequel to fully refine the genuinely good ideas the game has.