Thunder Ray [Review]

Dodge! Block! No, wait, I meant duck! And that’s a knockout... Again… Thunder Ray is a new-age Punch-Out!! style game developed by Purple Tree and published by both them and Crunchyroll. Thunder Ray is a fantastic love letter for the Punch-Out series from the NES and Wii. In this game, you play as a boxer named Thunder, fighting against some sort of alien invasion using his boxing abilities.

As mentioned before, Thunder Ray is clearly based on the Punch-Out series, with a slightly different style to it. Thunder Ray is colorful and vibrant, and a bit gorier than one would expect. When you knock out your opponent, they explode into blood and guts. Thunder Ray is a difficult game, maybe more so than even Punch Out, but to me, that game was hard as well. It’s difficult to know what action you need to take to dodge an oncoming attack. You can either dodge, block, or duck and if you make the wrong move, you're getting decked. It’s a little bit like rock, paper, and scissors. But you also can’t cancel actions. So, if you’re in the middle of punching and try to duck, Thunder will continue punching until he’s punched as many times as you hit the button before dodging. It makes the character feel slow. There’s also a frankly obnoxious feature where, if you are close to knock-out the screen zooms in and the entire screen goes dull. This makes it significantly harder to see what’s happening. Especially against brightly colored enemies like the Glam Witch. When the screen became dull, I literally couldn’t see her attacks at all, so when my health was low enough, I just had to accept being knocked out.

This game's bosses are rage-filled, and honestly, any casual gamer will hate this game. The difficulty scaling is absolutely bonkers, and once you struggle with a few fights and beat the game, players will react as I did and say, “Is that it?”. This game is super short, and the length of the game is honestly dictated by how badly you lose. It's worth noting that the voice acting in the game seems too computerized and emotionless for my taste; it's almost like AI was used or something. Lastly, the story, or lack thereof, was uncompelling and didn't need to be there. I like this game, but the issue with the screen losing color and then zooming in near death is awful, and some characters having moves that are too hard to read also makes me have a hard time recommending this game to most people. 

Being a Punch Out clone dosnt’t automatically

make this a good game. The difficulty scaling is a problem and many players will get frustrated and quit. Unfortunately with gaming there are so many games competing for our time and may people will give up on this fast, especially if they get frustrated. You want players to feel accomplished for winning fights in your game but instead it feels like punishment for trying.

the voice acting in the game seems too computerized and emotionless for my taste; it's almost like AI was used or something. Lastly, the story, or lack thereof, was uncompelling and didn't need to be there. I like this game, but the issue with the screen losing color and then zooming in near death is awful, and some characters having moves that are too hard to read also makes me have a hard time recommending this game to most people.