This week, I played through “Thor: God of Thunder,” and I must say I was underwhelmed. As a fan of the Marvel characters, I truly enjoy playing through games and watching movies with the super heroes taking center stage, but Thor was a bummer for me. The story starts out with Thor defending Asgard from a Frost Giant invasion, and then he’s off to take the fight to his enemies’ door. He battles through various Norse Mythology inspired levels ruled by hulking kings and servants of evil including Ulik the Rock Troll, Ymir the Frost Giant King, and Surtur the Fire Demon.
I won’t spoil the ending and what set in motion the devious plot that pits Thor against unimaginable odds to defend his home, but I will say the story just doesn’t quite seem up to snuff to me. I was counting on something spectacular, and this game just didn’t deliver on the story.
The graphics to Thor were subpar, something that would have been great four or five years ago, but not worthy of the newest generation of consoles. Even one of the bigger selling points to some players-the 3D experience-was unimpressive. The voice acting was actually decent as was the melee combat-very Viking god inspired.
The button mashing style works well in context with the subject of the game; you mash the button; Thor smashes the enemy and whatever else is in front of him.
The gameplay itself wasn’t exactly intuitive either. The controls are a little odd and take a little time to get used to. I found myself stuck on puzzles a couple of times, having no good sense of direction on where to go or what to do, but luckily the developers built in a hint system for just such an occasion. To me, any game that actually needs a hint system to tell the player what to do next or how to proceed needs to be rethought by the developers; that’s like the developers saying, “We didn’t know exactly how to make this better understood by the player, so at the last minute we threw in a list of hints to help them along in places and not let our mistakes stick out like a sore thumb in front of our audience.”
I would compare “Thor: God of Thunder” to a game such as “Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.” The only real difference was that instead of a team of four super heroes beating down baddies, you only play as Thor walloping legions of giants by himself with his trusty hammer, Mjolnir.
If you are the kind of person who can overlook last generation graphics, lukewarm story telling and shoddy direction at times so that you can play as Thor, mighty god of the storms, then you should pick this game up, but if you want something truly awesome, then you’ll have to keep waiting.
As for myself, I enjoyed the movie much more than I did the game. Thus, I must leave the game with a rating of two and a half out of five.