Thunderflash

For a brief moment in the mid-1980s, overhead run 'n gun shooters were all the rage. Led by major releases like Heavy Barrel, Guerilla War, Commando and Jackal, these were the video game equivalent of the cheesy action movies you were seeing from Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you remember those classic shoot 'em ups, then you're going to feel right at home with the new game Thunderflash by a developer named SEEP. With a rockin' chiptunes soundtrack and 8-bit art design, it's a throwback game so authentic that you'll swear that you played it in the arcade back in 1987. But is that enough to hold your interest in 2021? Let's find out.

You know the score: A terrorist organization known as Bloody Wolf is occupying Kashmir and only a pair of trained soldiers are tough enough to shoot their way through an entire army of bad guys. These heroes are Rock and Stan, two '80s action stars who look like they were lifted directly out of Heavy Barrel. Equipped with only a gun and grenades, they fight through five missions and twenty-five stages to free Kashmir and kill the terrorists.

For those who grew up playing these types of run 'n gun shooters, you may remember that one of the gimmicks you often saw was a joystick you could turn in order to rotate the hero. What we get in Thunderflash is more like the home console ports of those games, where we shoot in the direction the character is standing. I'm sure there was a temptation to turn this into a dual-stick shooter, but SEEP has kept the action decidedly old school.

In that sense, it feels like the developer had a checklist of cliches they wanted to hit. We start off fighting through a jungle, take to the air in a jetpack, fight a flying machine on a cliff, kill bad guys in a war-torn city, race through the water in a boat and so on so forth. If you've played an Ikari Warriors game before, then much of this will look familiar. This is a game that wears its inspiration on its sleeve. If you love this style of run 'n gun shooter, then you're probably going to get a kick out playing through this nostalgia-soaked throwback.

For that reason, Thunderflash is almost critic proof. I could argue that the gameplay feels outdated, aiming your gun isn't always easy, it's full of cheap hits and the entire affair is painfully shallow, but that's by design. Those are all things you could have said about countless arcade shooters in the 1980s, so of course they apply here. I have to imagine that fans of the genre would have been disappointed if this game mixed things up too much. The appeal is that it looks and feels exactly like the classic arcade games you remember.

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That's not to say that Thunderflash doesn't try to improve on the concept, because it does. This is a longer game than most of the titles it's drawing inspiration from. By having so many stages, the developer is able to mix things up by adding vehicle levels, lots of different bosses and not one, but two fantastic endings. I also like that it includes a harder difficulty and bonus modes, such as a boss rush and survival mode. These are things you didn't get from the original Commando, even when it was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System.

As somebody who grew up loving these old arcade games, I had a lot of fun playing through Thunderflash. From the moment I saw the boot-up screen and the pixel graphics, I knew that I was going to dig this game. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, SEEP is pointing to the wheel and reminding us how awesome it is. This is the kind of game we rarely see anymore. And even when somebody tries to bring the run 'n gun action back, they end up modernizing so much of it that it barely feels like the same thing. That's not the case here, and that's why it stands out more than most modern throwbacks.

That said, so much of this game relies on nostalgia. If you didn't grow up playing these types of games, then there's a real chance that you're going to be left scratching your head by Thunderflash. Why do the heroes move so slowly? Why are the enemies such good shots? Why are the bosses so cheap? Why can't you jump or roll out of the way? Why does the action sometimes slow down? Why are only two people taking on an entire army? These are all fair questions, but I would counter that it was the 1980s, and that's how we liked it.