Game #1149: Thor - God of Thunder

 God of bad videogames.

 As per usual, full disclosure, I didn't finish Thor: God of Thunder, and I really don't care, as the game is hot garbage. The latest entry in my quest to play more hack and slash games that eluded me, Thor was definitely not the game I was looking for. 

 When I first booted up the game I was a bit hopeful, developed by the same team as Rise of the Argonauts, the first thing I found in the options menu were alternate costumes and the ability to change the color of Thor's powers. Those are neat options in and of themselves. And then, I started the game...

 This is one of the dullest beat'em ups I've ever played. You use square to attack with your hammer, and can end your combos with Triangle for power attacks or R2 for hammer throw attacks. Pressing triangle by itself lets you use your Wind, Thunder and Lightning powers, while pressing R2 by itself lets you throw your hammer. You can guard with L2, and you get a useless dash with L1 that seems to lack any kind of invincibility frames. Combat is immensely unsatisfying, as attacks lack any kind of weight to them. Combo attacks are limited and boring. You can purchase upgrades, but all of them felt as uninspired as the combat itself. You can also search for hidden collectibles for permanent health and power upgrades, although some of these collectibles can only be found in the highest difficulty setting.

 The game is hard. The stages are easy, but the bosses are incredibly unfair, there's little you can do to avoid some of their attacks, and the only way to land hits is by being patient, and even then, they might simply go through your attacks, and since your dash is useless.. it's not much fun. Giant enemies are particularly bad because they end on glorified QTEs that take forever, as you slowly climb onto them and then mash Square or triangle. There's one boss in particular, Ulik, that is incredibly hard to defeat unless you cheese him by hammering him from afar. Once he is 'dead', a set of four QTE inputs must be pressed, you barely get time to react and you get tiny little prompts on the lower right corner of the screen. Thankfully, it's always the same four buttons, but until you learn which buttons these are... you will get hit, and maybe die, as you get them wrong or don't get enough time to react. It was awful.

 But what broke me was a stage with a morale meter, and you lose if you lose all morale. The checkpoint doesn't get me enough morale to defeat the giant enemy before it expires, so basically, I was screwed. And I didn't really care, I was looking for excuses to drop the game anyways.

 Thor: God of Thunder was pretty bad. Maybe not as bad as I remember the Iron Man 2 demo being, but still pretty bad. Sega has had such a bad track record with their MCU games that it's such a marvel that Captain America came out so good. Sadly, it's not like Thor fans have a lot of choices when it comes to videogames, but the DS version was relatively decent even if a bit overrated.

 3.0