Reviews

This was and remains one of my favourite Spectrum games ever.

Three karate dudes kicking ass with a wide range of punches and kicks combined with an awesome tune and a glorious background makes this one of the finest games ever created.

The game also has some nice thumping sound to go with it but strangely this is turned off defaultly, so press N to get the sound and be amazed even further.

There's also a bonus game in between that sees you deflect balls away from you. Admittedly it's a bit boring compared to the fighting but essential for increasing score and rank, you want to become a black belt after all you know.

Amazing game, still plays great today.

Thundercats is one of those games that for me feels like a missed opportunity.

On the surface it looks good, some nice graphics and detail and I absolutely love the title music, another timeless classic from Rob Hubbard. Kind of funny he produced some good legendary stuff on the Spectrum given he absolutely hated the sound chip.

But the gameplay can be best described as an anti-climax. You have your sword and you’re hitting the baddies with it and more often than not you will be killed by the sheer swarmth of them. You also need to jump over gaps to avoid falling, but even then you are liable to wind up jumping directly into an enemy in the process.

You also have a power ball to collect during the levels beginning with level 2 and this is more effective than the sword. I'm sure it had a proper name but my memory's escaped me.

All this is done until you reach the end of the level of which you need to reach before the time limit for a bonus. You also got a kill bonus depending on how many kills you got during the level.

Thundercats did not need to be a race to the checkpoint-style game. I get that it's meant to make the game play with a fast pace but given Gargoyle Games were widely known for their adventure-type games Thundercats could quite easily have been another one of their epic adventure-style games.

But instead it's a game where the main ojective is not to kill as many enemies as you can but rather to reach the finish as quickly as possible. Again, Thundercats did not need to be this kind of game.

But I think the main thing to remember is that Thundercats as a product was conceived very late into development. Initially this was written as a very separate game called Samurai Dawn. It's not the first time Elite have change a game late for the sake of a licence. James Bond's Live and Let Die was initially written as Aquablast before the Bond licence as acquired very late into development and thus the change was made.

This was possibly similar since according to a previous review Samurai Dawn was nearly finished but eventually never released.

Thundercats isn't a bad game in general but it just felt like it could have been so much better if it was made like a proper adventure rather than a rushy race to the checkpoint game.

Indeed it's possibly the most arcade game Gargoyle produced, but did it really need to be an arcade game?

Like I said at the start, a missed opportunity.