Thor: God of Thunder is an awful video game that should not be played by anyone ever for any reason.
Since it's a given that Thor: God of Thunder is a terrible game, let's go over the things that are actually enjoyable:
- The box art is kind of cool.
- Thor's hammer spin looks pretty neat.
- Thor's lightning storm attack actually looks pretty awesome.
So that's pretty much it as far as enjoyable content goes for Thor: God of Thunder. The entire rest of the game is an unbearable climb up the most tedious of mountains; completing God of Thunder literally feels like the video game equivalent of climbing Mount Everest entirely against your own will.
First and foremost, Thor: God of Thunder is a ridiculously difficult game, even on the standard difficulty setting. The difficulty can be alleviated somewhat by playing on easy, but you're still stuck with an insanely frustrating and tedious experience that you'll more than likely not want to see through to its conclusion, regardless of your chosen difficulty. The problem isn't necessarily that Thor is hard, the issue lies more in the fact that a large part of the difficulty stems from the games complete and utter general incompetence in nearly all facets of its design.
Thor: God of Thunder is not inherently broken; that's to say that, well... it works. If you put the game in your disc drive it will turn on and you can play it, but playing it is not fun. The hit detection is way off on nearly all counts, and a lot of the time you'll find yourself hammering away on the attack button with nothing as to a clue as to whether you're even connecting with any of your attacks. It's even worse when you're trying to attack in the air. The game is also completely unresponsive, often times you'll input button presses only to have Thor either stand there doing absolutely nothing or doing something completely different from the intended action. It doesn't help either that there is some serious input delay in nearly every aspect of the game, making combat feel sluggish and disconnected.
It's obvious from playing the game that there was a mild attempt to mimic the successful formula of other games, most notably that of God of War. I wouldn't say that Thor feels like a cheap God of War rip-off because in retrospect it plays absolutely nothing like the games in that fantastic series, but more in that the style of Thor is taken from it. A lot of enemies can be grappled after they've taken enough damage and with a small quick time event can be dealt massive amounts of damage. This isn't really necessary against normal enemies but there is not a single boss in the game that can be defeated without them.
Unfortunately none of the boss fights ever resemble anything even remotely close to fun, and are the most tedious, frustrating, irritating, every synonym for the previously mentioned words possible and will have you wanting to tear your hair out of your head and screaming in agony. Not only are the boss fights in Thor completely trial and error, they're almost completely imbalanced in the way that they're designed. There is absolutely no health regeneration in the game, and even if you manage to get the upgrade that restores Thor's Odinforce used for special powers, you'll always find yourself completely depleted of one of the two, in most cases both. The most irritating part of Thor's boss fights is that almost all of them are multi-tiered encounters and when you finally figure out how to defeat one of them you'll have to shift into the second or third phase, die, and then repeat the entire process over, and over, and over again.
General gameplay isn't much less frustrating, as Thor you will visit three different planets of the nine worlds of Norse mythology and run around mostly uninteresting and poorly designed environments being locked in small areas. Fighting enemies frequently proves to be just as frustrating as the boss fights, often you'll be required to take on seemingly endless hordes of extremely tough foes, and when you think the torture is over you'll have to face a final even stronger one, and then have to do the entire thing all over again because you died.
There's a skill tree in God of Thunder, but it's pretty rudimentary. After defeating foes you'll gain Valor that you can spend on upgrading Thor's powers. The tree is split into five basic premises that comprise all of Thor's abilities: combat, hammer throwing, lightning, thunder, and wind. Each tree branches off into two different directions and then ultimately meeting up once again at the end. To get the final and most powerful ability of each tree you'll need to have completed both the left and right sides, but there's only 5 abilities per skill tree: two on each side, and then one at the very end. Several of the skills are actually extremely useful but you'd never know until you actually have them.
Some skills in particular are so useful that they're pretty much a necessity to beat the game, but if you spend all of your points without realizing this it could be easy to get yourself into a near impossible to beat scenario. The game is designed to be replayed while carrying over your stats and upgrades but it's not fun enough the first time to warrant a replay. There's also absolutely no way to change the difficulty after you've started a game, so if you eventually find yourself at odds with the insane difficulty level part way through, you'll either have to start over, abandon the game completely, or stubbornly adhere to your chosen difficulty setting until you give yourself an ulcer.
One of the worst features of God of Thunder is that it's a complete eyesore. It's absolutely perplexing that a game created on the Unreal 3 engine can look this awful. It would still look bad even if it was a PlayStation 2 game. Some of Thor's powers look cool, but that's simply not enough to make up for the piss-poor level design and uninspired art direction. It's completely inexcusable for a game to look this terrible in 2011.
God of Thunder likes to boast on the back of its case that it features the voice talent of Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston as Thor and Loki respectively from the recent film, there's nothing really noteworthy about either of their performances. They're rather average, although considering the game they've lent their voices to it's probably one of the only bright spots in a game grasping at anything to make itself not completely worthless. None of the voice acting in the game is really necessary bad but it's all pretty much completely average at best. Sound effects range from mediocre to bad, and you'll wind up having the death sound effect burned into your memory long before you're even remotely close to completing the game. The music in the game serves as functional background music but might as well be nonexistent since absolutely nothing stood out to me at any point in the game.
What's really frustrating about Thor: God of Thunder is that it's an obvious movie tie-in video game with little redeeming quality; but not only is the gameplay tedious and boring, none of it works very well and when you combine awful sloppy and unresponsive gameplay mechanics with extreme difficulty you end up with an overwhelmingly undesirable gaming experience that is literally completely lacking in interest to anyone. Thor ultimately ends up feeling like an absolutely tiring and draining experience that relentlessly beats you down over and over again until you just don't even want to play it anymore. Only the most stubborn of individuals with an extreme adherence to awful games will manage to see this journey through to its conclusion, but spending money on this awful excuse for a video game is about the same equivalent to burning money in front of a homeless orphan. Do yourself and Thor a favour and stay far, far away from this hopeless wreck of a video game.