A few weeks ago the Thundercats game was released for the Nintendo DS by Bandai-Namco. Obviously I’ve been sitting on this review and frankly, the game isn’t very good. The story stars off promisingly enough, setting a stage where the lizard army is attacking Thundera and General Grune betrays the cats – similar to the pilot of the animated series reboot. Unfortunately, as soon as you start to play the game, the fun is pretty much over.
The game is a simple 2D side-scrolling platform game where you primarily play as Lion-O. No complaints there, I’ve played plenty of great 2D scrollers, and being Lion-O armed with the Sword of Omens fighting Mumm-Ra and an army of lizards could be a blast. It could be, but it’s not. The graphics and music are dated, I’ll assume they were targeting for a retro-vibe and just didn’t get there. That’s kinder than to assume that these were the best graphics and music they could come up with.
Gameplay is boring and repetitive. Clearly the designers ascribed to the philosophy that “more is more” since you simply go through stage after stage fighting a seemingly endless number of identical enemies with the same attack over and over and over again. In some games this amounts to mindless fun – here it is just mindless. Throughout game play some variety is introduced as you can have characters drop in and help, but it’s not enough to save the game. On top of the boring gameplay, the mechanics of the game are sloppy and Lion-O is difficult to control. The good news is, you’ll want to quit playing before the poor mechanics really start to bother you.
I’ll stop here, actually, which is about where I stopped in the game. I went far enough to really realize I wasn’t having fun, despite the fact that I really wanted it. It’s disappointing and unfortunate that this game is the final product to come from Bandai’s Thundercats reboot, it certainly didn’t end on a high note. Instead of this game, you should grab yourself a set of the Icon Heroes Thundercats minimates – you’ll have a lot more fun with those.
