Game #1152: Thor - God of Thunder(Wii)

  Thunderous clapback.

 Thor on the PS3 was a pathetic attempt at bringing Marvel's god of thunder to the videogame realm, however, surprisingly, this Wii iteration is slightly better, although it's still quite a few ways off from being a good game.

 It's another beat'em up, and it shares quite a few similarities to the main game. It follows the same story, although it tells it in a very different way. Character designs are a bit more cartoony, but they work well, on the other hand, cutscenes are told through ugly stills. Almost as if to make up for that, it features a full episode of Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes, an episode focused on Thor as you'd expect. Speaking of extras, this game has more unlockable costumes than the PS3 version, which was a very welcome bonus.

 As a hater of all things motion, having mandatory motion controls wasn't much fun. Weak attacks are performed with the A button, but strong attacks... are done by shaking the Wiimote. While pointing with the Wiimote to throw the hammer could've been appropriate, in this game you must hold down the C button, to have Thor spin the hammer, and then shake the nunchuck, Thor will just throw it against the nearest enemy. There are Wiimote and Nunchuck shaking QTEs which weren't very nice, and there's no way to move the camera around which is as cumbersome as it sounds. Using elemental powers also involves shaking the Wiimote, but dodging? Now that's a doozy, you use the tiny Dpad, and how you dodge depends on where Thor is facing, which is needlessly confusing.

 There are a couple of flying stages which weren't half bad, as you point at stuff and bring it down with Thor's thunders. I felt the high destructibility of the environments to be quite fun, even during the on-foot stages. It's nothing worth writing home about, but it felt good. That said, the framerate isn't very solid, although it's playable...most of the time.

 The fighting is acceptable, but some sections where just TOO long. That said, it's not like it's horrendous, plus, you can buy upgrades with earned experience points, and you can equip up to four runes to grant Thor some passive buffs. As your combo gets longer, all your combos get perks, such as increased range, which was a neat idea, and once the counter reached 50 you can spend your combo counter on a super Storm, which resets the combo counter to zero but deals a ton of damage. Not a bad idea!

 While it's still not very good, Thor on the Wii is definitely a better pick than its PS3 counterpart. It seems like these developers actually wanted to make something decent, it's just that the budget wasn't there.

 4.0