izigame.me

Nightdive further proving that they're evolving with cool improvements to KEX to some rougher but still interesting gems from the past.
Let me get this out of the way: It's not perfect, The Thing (game) will have issues, & if you as a player put a heavy $ value on hours spent then know you can beat this anywhere between 3-9hrs, with no other game modes. So for the 30$/£/€ that might be too much for some people out there.
Took me 7hrs on a relatively causal playthrough taking my time exploring. I did enjoy this & see myself replaying it sometime in the future alongside many other linear singleplayer campaigns from the past that I enjoy revisiting.
Important nitpicks:
- Music! The music is weirdly absent for a lot of the campaign, a handful of 10sec stingers here & there in a cutscene but even bossfights lack music-- Though I feel like it's okay if bossfights lack some music, but they need to compensate with some more awful monster screams. If Nightddive could just patch in even some dynamic occasional ambient tracks even if recycling the pre-existing ones then that would elevate this quite a bit.
- Balancing? I don't mind too much that this is a lot more easier than the original, but... maybe a tiny bit too easy? There's a ton of cool modern QoL stuff with how aiming works & input shortcuts you have & overall feel & even some AI tweaks, but I dunno, maybe some ammo could have been removed or hidden more thoroughly? A lot of ammo/medkits were just on your critical path in plain sight, maybe just tuck them away if not outright delete some? or tie them to difficulty settings more perhaps.
- Maybe a few too many of the headcrab enemies swarming you, wanted more bigger threats.
Would have been cool to see some tweaks to maybe trust & panicking just to make them more prevalent, earning trust harder & losing trust easier, & squadmates losing their s**t more easier for longer periods forcing you to use adrenaline or your stungun, I never used my stungun on an NPC. (though again maybe difficulty based?)
Anyway, otherwise, overall I think this is a really cool game with neat mechanics, not exactly survival horror (could be with a few tweaks) but the ambition with the squad mechanics where you do need engineers to progress & medics are (somewhat) useful as well (soldier class not so much) & you give them weapons & ammo & heal them or use blood kit tests on them or yourself to earn trust, Nightdive did make the infection system much less scripted & more reliant on NPCs getting damaged by creatures, I replayed a few bits to get some squadmates through uninfected & it worked, could be a fun replay to try & keep everyone safe (apart from a few scripted moments where you're forced to leave others behind).
Infection could have used some more tweaks, maybe they're there & subtle, but I didn't notice, like maybe infected fire their weapons less on other infected enemies, miss more often their shots, maybe they hang back more & get 'lost', or start losing trust in you more easily & panicking forcing you to do things that can make other lose trust in you.
Nightdive did a lot, the movement & shooting is pretty snappy, having those weapon wheels & item wheels that Nightdive have put into many of their previous KEX remasters were handy as were flamethrower&healing shortcuts, some nice options, can't fully turn off autoaim but on low it's pretty useless & you have to aim, which did make fighting the headcrabs more frustrating, though first person aiming seemed pretty reliable.
Graphically I really liked the look, with not only the dynamic lighting/shadowing put to great use but then the shaders to enhance materials from slimy fleshy thing creatures to metals & snow & bloodpools, visually reminding me of Chronicles of Ridd!ck or idtech4 games though with more advanced shaders & less broken shadowing on character faces. But Nightdive didn't stop there, they also went over most levels & added appropriate little details, not just more polygons on props but entirely new details to make the environments richer with the added touches.
Textures might be AI upscaled, not sure, but seemed tastefully done, looked decent & game is only 4GB in size so at least some devs seem to know how to compress/optimize their file sizes (*glares at Aspyr*).
Performance seems great, nothing to complain about, locked it at 60fps 1600x900 (just my preference, I suspect I could have gotten higher) & it stayed there from start to finish, though I will say I think there's minor shader comp stutter which in cutscenes when it happens for the first time it can put the audio out of sync so that lipsyncing is off; start a fresh game & intro cutscene audio desyncs, but quit & restart, watch same cutscene & now it's synced up.
Played on a laptop: i5-11400H 3050RTX 4GBVRAM 16GBRAM Win11.
Story & voice acting is incredibly cheesy, but I'm a fan of retro games anyway so just a bonus for me, but it's still nothing to write home about, relatively predictable plot developments.
With a few more tweaks, music, some item placements, maybe some AI tweaks to how infected behave when undetected & maybe how panic/trust scales in difficulty levels so that you're more "forced" to use stuff like adrenaline or stunguns or I didn't even know until checking the field guide manual but there's a system where you can go into first person, aim for 3secs at some panicking squadmates head to get unique commands? Would have been cool to be "forced" to engage with systems like that.
I think you'd have a really tense borderline survival horror experience, with save stations, relying on engineers & medics to survive & progress but forced to wrangle with the mental breakdowns & potential sabotage.
I liked it, but it's for people who enjoy 2000's short & sweet games with their jank & cheesy stories. Really cool systems with great potential that's 3/5ways there, hopefully some patches tweak them or we get more modding potential? Fingers crossed that Nightdive get to do Aliens vs Predator 2 with the same treatment, making it look like this with shaders & dynamic lighting/shadowing is a dream come true.