XBOX Review: The Thing (2002)

Unfortunately, The Thing is more like a subpar Freedom Fighters than a truly engaging "sequel" to the 1982 film. It has the requisite squad tactics and some neat ideas governing emotional responses from your teammates, but those ideas are poorly realized and unfulfilled, and in some cases downright misleading.

The Thing is somewhere between a sequel and a loose remake of its parent film, set sometime after those events but essentially telling a remarkably similar story, at least at first. An alien race has surfaced in an Antarctic military research base, with the alien infection often taking the form of your human allies. As you investigate what happened to your colleagues, you must maintain their trust, in addition to watching your own back for lurking thing-creatures, which emerge out of your pals in a particularly gruesome fashion.

This is a fairly standard third-person action game with the exception of a neat trust/fear mechanic for your squad. It's neat-o in theory, anyway. Your squad (of up to four) get all a-scared by the alien creatures, as well as by gore, darkness, being alone, and so on. They'll hunker down and won't be helpful to you if they get too scared, so you settle them down by forking over firearms or health. You also never know when one of them will morph into A Thing, which you can check by drawing blood from them at any time. A cool idea, for sure, except that it doesn't work at all: a guy who tests positive for Human will turn around a minute later and reveal himself to be Thing the next, seemingly only because you're moving on to the next level and your squad can't carry over across the loading screen.

The Thing has more problems, unfortunately. Not only do the squad tactics barely function, but the enemy AI is generally incompetent and behaves strangely most of the time. The terrifying threat of aliens is rendered not so terrifying when they can barely navigate most doorways. Additionally, this game has some incredibly frustrating missions later on, only because the checkpoint and save systems are so poorly implemented. There's a whole lot of backtracking, repetition, and memorization depending on when you can find a save point, and how well you were doing when you found this save point.

In general, The Thing is not a good game. It's a decent quick fix for anyone desiring of a Freedom Fighters-style squad shooter, but it gets old quickly and does follow through on many of its promises.

Singular Van Dammage: Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016)

The Van Dammage is back! I watched another Jean-Claude Van Damme film yesterday morning, for the first time in a long time, and now I'm here to tell you about it because this is actually a pretty good one. More Van Damme to come, so stay tuned to Code Redd Net.

Van Damme really isn't in this one a whole lot, but still. He plays Master Durand, who lives in Thailand and trains fighters for underground muay thai combat. Very much like the original Kickboxer, an idiot kickboxing champion takes up a sketchy offer to fight the legendary Tong Po, and his idiot brother lets him. When our reigning champion is killed by Tong Po, his brother, Kurt Sloane, vows revenge and you know the deal. Durand-Van Damme agrees to train him in his idiosyncratic manner for mortal kombat with Tong Po. This involves lots of stretching, as you'd expect.

This is basically a remake of the original film, with Van Damme playing his trainer and a new actor, Alain Moussi, playing Van Damme's role, although there are all kinds of allusions to the previous film which make Kickboxer: Vengeance seem like an alternate universe. This is a fantastic action movie, right up there with recent classics like Mechanic: Resurrection (2016) and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (2017). In fact, I'd say this probably better than the original Kickboxer, and one of the most effective martial arts films in recent memory. This is a lean action film, with well-choreographed fight scenes, a goofy plot, and plenty of training montages. It just gets the job done in a way that old-fashioned hard genre films should, and, suitably, it builds nicely to the final fight between Sloane and Tong Po, which delivers. I also think Van Damme does an excellent job in his role, playing an effective secondary character who doesn't have to carry the film by, you know, talking a whole lot, which is certainly not his strong suit.

There are some problems, however. For the most part, Kickboxer: Vengeance looks and sounds cheap, and while I sometimes find low production values charmingly nostalgic in action films, in this case they were too bad to even be funny. In particular, many of JCVD's lines are clearly redone hastily with some ADR, with the actor performing the lines doing a horrible burlesque of Van Damme's accent. Nevertheless, KV is a perfect, stupid Sunday afternoon movie. It's rough around the edges, but it definitely delivers the goods in ways that most action films don't anymore.

Xbox Review: Breakdown (2004)

Breakdown is a neat idea. It's mostly a first-person beat-'em-up, but also a first-person shooter, and even occasionally a first-person burger-eating and puking simulator. Everything unfolds for you through the eyes of Derrick, who wakes up in a lab just in time for war to break out between humans and some strangely buff aliens. There you meet Alex, your emo girl companion for the bulk of the game. The two of you then set off to unravel the mystery of these aliens, and your identity a la Jackie Chan's Who Am I? (1998), through some incredibly elliptical writing and absolutely maddening combat sequences.

Everything in Breakdown takes place in first-person view. At first blush, this is novel; you shoot, fight hand-to-hand, platform, fall out of windows, backflip, eat, puke, read, and more from Derrick's POV. This novelty quickly subsides, however, and the first-person perspective becomes alternatively disorienting, distracting, or downright difficult to handle. It's often impossible to keep track of your enemies, due partially to the game's inadequate lock-on targeting system, as well as larger problems with the first-person perspective itself. Since everything takes place in first-person, including when you get knocked down (and this happens often), recovering a proper perspective to launch a counterattack is frequently impossible when confronted with multiple enemies. Similarly, later stages in the game require a great deal of platforming, always a fun proposition from a first-person perspective. Other stages consist largely of empty hallways punctuated by frustrating enemy encounters.

The fun of recovering health by consuming stray sodas and hamburgers in a Streets of Rage fashion, or driving jeeps over caverns in first-person view, is largely overwhelmed by later levels in the game. In particular, there are two combat sequences near the conclusion of the game that are among the most aggravating I've ever played. You simply can't see the attacks coming your way, so instead you're treated to a kaleidoscope of images as your character is knocked around by mutants. Sure, perhaps this is a realistic representation of being beaten up by a crew of obscenely swoll alienmans, but it is emphatically not an enjoyable experience. I wanted to like Breakdown, and to its credit, there's very few games like it. And as it turns out, there's a pretty good reason why. Breakdown is a failed experiment; fascinating and educational in its own way, but deeply flawed.