Thor: God of Thunder Review

We really ought to stop this sort of thing. Maybe sign petitions urging the console makers to refuse to license this trash. Congress could pass some laws. Thor: God of Thunder is a game that should not have been made. Seriously, the people who made this game shouldn't have bothered. It's insulting really, to think that they felt comfortable asking people for money to play this piece of shit. I find myself wondering, "At what dollar amount did the developers' judgment become so impaired that they agreed to make this game? How much did their souls cost?" Somehow, I get the distinct feeling that number is embarrassingly low.

Thor: God of Thunder is an attempt to cash-in on the latest movie from Marvel. So, it is a game based on a movie that's based on a comic book. Those have been good! Once. Spider-Man 2 (sort of) which was by no means one of the greatest games ever released. In other words, this was a terrible idea to start with.

That's Thor.

There's Thor again.

The general idea of the game is that you're Thor and you go around beating things with your hammer, and using your magic powers of wind, lightning and thunder (yes, lightning and thunder are separate abilities). Basically, this just means you press the X button a lot, with the occasional Y press to perform a combo. That's the extent of the fighting system, you press X a whole lot. You press X for hours on end. You can grapple with the B button, which just means you knock the bigger enemies down and punch them with the X button or you throw the smaller enemies. You can kill the bigger guys you knocked down and throw them too, but when throwing a dude, the game doesn't bother with having Thor aim where he throws the corpse, you just toss it more or less behind you.

Ostensibly, this is supposed to involve a lot of action and fighting, and crazy moves, but really you just press X for hours on end. It's as fun as it sounds. On the bigger, boss enemies, this means you're pressing X against the same dude for ten and twenty minutes at a time. Drugs couldn't even make this interesting or enjoyable. Essentially, they took the gameplay from God of War, reduced that to pressing one button, removed all of the personality of that series and inserted some really boring gibberish, which ostensibly has to do with Norse mythology, but of course they fuck that up too. Like the character of Sif, who is primarily associated with a myth concerning her golden hair, so naturally her hair in this incarnation is jet black. That's usually the hair color I associate with Scandinavians.

So you have a boring rip-off of God of War, but maybe the story and the characters will be good. After all, Thor is a popular character, and can be well written, at least as is evidenced by past comic book sales, and his tenure on the Avengers.

Oh wait, this is cash-in on a cash-in. The writing is going to be terrible.

And in this way, Thor: God of Wa... Thunder doesn't disappoint. The writing is terrible. Honestly, I can't tell if the voice acting is shitty or if what the actors have to say is so stupid that it just comes off as being shitty. Either way, the result is the same, I felt alienated from the universe and frustrated every time there was another cut-scene. After all, when you can't bring yourself to care about the characters or the fate of their universe, the story becomes more of a chore than the repetitive, derivative gameplay.

How about the titular character of Thor? He's a completely humorless idiot who aspires to commit genocide and is not sympathetic in any way (he sounds like a decent sort of bloke - Vader). Thor has two emotions, neither of which he is able to separate from one another. These two emotions are shouting and wood. Loki, the mischief god, is equally as humorless, coming off less like some sort of agent of chaos, and more like a guy that would fuck with kids at the bus stop.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game doesn't even look particularly good, with the artistic direction being best described as "silly." It's hard to take this shit seriously. The animations are stiff and uninteresting, but that's pretty much the hallmark of this game. Some of the animations are needlessly long, or look so unnatural that it is pretty clear Thor isn't interacting with his environment, he's just waiting for an animation to finish.