Thunder Zone

Copyright : Firebird | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

Protect the federation?s space against some bad invader type people. Probably. I don?t know the plot and I can?t find anything out about it either? make up your own back story chances are it?ll be more fun than playing this game any way?

Graphics

To give it?s due, what little there is to see is pretty well done. The alien crafts are colourful and easy to distinguish between. The game moves at a fairly decent speed too and it?s fair to say that in terms of the graphics, there?s very little else they could have done to better the game.

Having said that, the overall presentation is a little sloppy particularly the ?dashboard? (for want of a better word) which looks pretty underwhelming and amateurish. Add to this the rather poor depictions of your weapons that are certainly varied but uninspired.

Far from stunning, the graphics in this game are never going to win any award but are about as good as you could expect and are certainly not the biggest problem with this effort.

Sound

The usual suspects in terms of sound effects, the pinging of your lasers and whooshing of your warp drive is not enough quite frankly. There is no music at all to add to the experience and it all just feels a little bit rushed and the sound effects that there are, feel more like an afterthought than a strong inclusion.

Gameplay

Stricken by a truly abysmal control system, Thunder Zone is damned from the outset. With rotational controls rather than directional, this is a pretty complex set of controls for what is basically a simplistic shoot em-up. The only way to gauge which direction you are headed is by a small icon on the control panel.

This control method makes chasing down enemy craft difficult, particularly as there is no crosshair on screen or any other guide to how far away your laser beams are from an enemy craft.

You do have several different weapon types but they all seem to do the same thing, pretty much, and some other options which may or may not be shields and going into hyper drive. It?s all very confusing and unsatisfying to be honest.

Thunder Zone?s biggest problem is that seems to think something more than it is. In essence it?s a simple shoot-em-up but the insistence on bizarre controls and over complicated weapon choices makes it more of a mess than an element of strategy, I?m afraid.

Ultimately unrewarding, Thunder Zone is too difficult to be worth spending much time over and comes across as a poor man?s Codename MAT.