Lead character Dennis Riley is an officer in a crack unit of special forces reconnaissance soldiers and is an instantly likeable character with some decent acting mixed in with some sarcastic wit. Players should also enjoy the fact that Dennis starts off with a cool-looking rifle (rather than a bog-standard pistol) which remains his primary weapon through the game. Overall the character is not as cool as Solid Snake or Gabe Logan, but as he's probably the youngest officer in the team it's understandable that a small amount of naivety creeps into his character. In the end of course, Dennis is not the star of the show, but rather the enormous and grotesque creatures he is forced to encounter during his mission.

When the game gets underway for the first time some players may be put off by the terrible lip-synching in the opening cinema. I've noticed that this opening movie has a bad "PAL conversion" feel about it as it staggers along with a slightly dodgy frame rate. This is strange because the rest of the in-game cinemas do not suffer from this problem. Anyway, the movie outlines the arrival of the team to an Antarctic base in which the mainland has lost contact with. An engine fire in the plane causes it to crash, but unlike most games the majority of the team is left alive, and it becomes a matter or urgency to rendezvous with them to continue the mission. From here the game borrows heavily from films such as "The Thing", and "Outbreak" with a storyline involving a biological incident (I'm not giving away the plot here as this information is made quite plain throughout the game). It also borrows from games such as "Fade to Black" and "Cyberia" with a mixture of alien meteor references and slithering membrane-like creatures.

Now let's talk about Dennis' gun. It's extremely cool. Honestly. The starting weapon has an excellent laser sight (for normal aiming as well as a first-person sniper mode) and has a built-in torch function (to see in those extremely dark spots). The player also has the option to attach new devices when they are found. These devices include a shotgun unit, grenade launcher, flame thrower, night-vision scope, long-distance zoom sniper sight, and an auto lock function. You can customise the rifle at any time, so if you have removed the torch in order to use the shotgun attachment, you can change the two over at a later time if you come across a dark area.