Thunder Paw from Ratalaika Games is a game that will feature on the Evercade Indie Heroes Collection 3 cart that will arrive in 2024. The game is currently available for a bunch of other systems including the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS4, and even on the PlayStation Vita and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis! Yup it’s a retro style game and they have put in the effort to even put it on classic hardware. This is pretty much where the end of my praise will come.
I’ve played the game through on the Evercade VS. The Evercade is fully back in swing with the Game of the Month promotion. Each month they let players update their Evecade VS and Evercade EXP consoles to download a free game to play as much as they like. These games will later be part of the upcoming Indie Heroes Collection 3.
Last month they gave us Donut Dodo which was the first game revealed for Indie Heroes 3, and now this month we have Thunder Paw. I’ll be honest, my spidey sense was tingling that this may not be as good as the excellent Donut Dodo, so I hesitated to update my EXP and just updated and played the game on the VS. Oh boy am I glad I still get an extra month of Donut Dodo on the portable Evercade before I have to decide if I’m going to update again.
Thunder Paw, in my humble opinion, is probably the least fun game I’ve played this year. It may be the worst game on Evercade and it’s definitely the game I’ve enjoyed least out of the Indie Heroes Collection titles.
I don’t say this lightly, but it’s honestly such a shame as it feels like there could be a good game lurking in here, but some really bizarre choices make it an exercise in frustration. At various points whilst playing it I considered that the game should be called Thunder Paw: The Backtracking Adventure, Thunder Paw: Joycon Drift or Thunder Paw: Leave Logic at the Door.
There is very little story. You play as a dog, some bad guy sets off what looks like a nuke and then you have to rescue your family…or something. After the opening screens which gave the story there was no story elements throughout and the game just ends with a black screen which says congratulations and play again on a higher difficulty. I’m guessing there will be a proper end screen if you complete it on hard mode, and I did it on the standard normal setting. I won’t go back to play it on hard.
I have many issues with the game, but rather than continue with this review sounding like I’m bashing the game or being sarcastic, I’d rather critique it to highlight where I feel it went wrong and how the game could be fixed to actually be quite fun.
First of all is the jumping. As a 2D platformer the height and speed of your jump feels like you’re on the moon. It’s much too floaty and it makes it hard to time jumps to dodge enemy bullets and also aim your own shots. This brings me to the shooting. Throughout the game you get various new weapons which have different characteristics, but only really the penultimate one is any good at all.
Bullets that you have shot vanish half way across the screen whilst the enemy bullets will fly at you the entire length of the screen. This means you have to get super close to shoot the bad guys. This isn’t the purpose of a gun! Guns are long range weapons. Then you get a gun which bounces bullets like Super Mario’s fire flower. There are no enemies or situations in the game where having bouncing bullets give you an advantage over ones that shoot straight.
To complete each level you need to kill all the bad guys in each stage. You can also collect green things for extra continues and dog bones for….I’m not sure. And when you kill baddies they drop diamonds but I have no idea what their purpose was for.
In what was probably the worst decision when the game was made you get a weird shotgun like recoil every time you shoot a gun. Regardless of what gun it is. And then jolts the character backwards which is a crazy thing to add to a platformer. It means every time you shoot you have to edge forward and often you can fall off platforms as a result. What makes this more frustrating is that when you shoot enemies they literally don’t react and keep going on their path until their defeated. How can it be that your character jolts back by firing a gun, but that the enemies can just walk into gunfire unphased?
Also the final gun you get in the game gives you exploding bullets. The explosion hurts the enemies but the explosion happens when the bullet has travelled a set distance instead of when it hits an enemy. This means you can shoot at an enemy and you’ll see the bullet fly through them and then explode behind them whilst they are uninjured. What?
The platforming is also super annoying as you have loads of areas where you have to make blind jumps to collect bones and if you’re not in the right position you sometimes have to do a ton of backtracking to get back to the place to attempt the jump again. As the game goes on you find there are big red exclamation marks which you soon realise (because the game doesn’t tell you) indicate that there is a bottomless pit underneath. Missing a jump and falling off the bottom of the screen is common in platformers so don’t know why they felt the need to plaster the game with these red punctuation marks. What makes this worse is that towards the end of the game you find bottomless pits which suddenly don’t have these signposted. Now you may think this is just them adding to the challenge, but it’s just the game being unfair. They’d established one rule, so naturally you’d feel if there is no marker that there must be something down there to explore. Nope. Just lose a life.
Fortunately, having played this on the Evercade I could use quick saves, and I’ll be honest, I would have given up on this game fairly quickly if I hadn’t been able to quicksave.
I’ve saved the worst offending part of the game until last, and that is the world 2 boss fight. At the end of each world you face a boss and for some crazy reason the hardest one is the world 2 boss. The bosses at the end of 1, 3 and 4 are much easier and facing them were some of the better designed parts of the game. Mainly because the boss fights were just in small areas and didn’t have frustrating platforming.
The world 2 boss is some fox character and it shoots bullet hell at you. All the bullets look the same, but some go straight and some bounce and they have insane range. Meanwhile at this stage of the game you have only just got the fire flower bouncing bullet thing and it’s so ineffective. It took me dozens of quick saves and reloads to get past it. Maybe you’ll play the game and realise some trick I didn’t and it’s easy, but it wasn’t apparent to me why this one was insanely harder than the others.
I was close to giving up at this point other than I intended to review this game. If it had been the final boss I would have understood more by still felt it was unfair.
But bringing this review to an end I can say that if anyone wants to hack this game in future and fix it, here are how it could be done. Get rid of the shotgun like recoil, get rid of all the backtracking, make enemies recoil when you hit them, make the guns useful, limit faith jumps and get rid of boss 2. If all of this was achieved I’m sure this would be a 3 out of 5.
The graphics are inoffensive is a little bland and the music is only slightly annoying. Gameplay and logic are terrible though. This is a generous 2 star review for me.
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