Game:

Thunder Ray (2023)

Duration: 10:03:30

3,794 views

42

I'm kidding of course, couldn't beat Evil Rico on beast in the end... but contender is good enough right? Right!?

This one had a couple bad design decisions. I think they were a deal breaker, on why I didn't gather enough motivation to get that last 10% of consistency, to beat Evil Rico on hard.

Manual charged attacks are kind of useless. It's slow, does about the same amount of damage and worst of all: requires you to do extra brain gymnastics, in a game where you spend all your attention on the enemy's attack pattern. If there is a mechanic behind it, it's lost to me, should've had the coach instruct me then.

That god awful zoomed in white view mode, when you're low on health. I get it, immersion, but this is horrible for a game where you've got to be on point to react to whatever the enemy throws at you. Horrible, remove it now! I promise, nothing will be lost.

Why do I have to bash the button to get back up? I've got 3 lives anyway, so no reason to wear down my fingers. Again I suppose the answer is immersion. I kind of get it, when the enemy is down, you've got to spam it to regain health, and so you can not do it and do some form of no-heal any% or something, but even then, spamming = bad, cuz got to keep your fingies from dying.

The enemy block mechanic is terrible. I didn't find any logic behind it, seems like there's a % chance of enemy blocking your hits, and he blocks 4 times in a row, that's a counter from him. It's horrible. They could've done so many other things but instead they went the easy route to just block at random. Billion beat for example punished you when you tried to attack at the wrong time, but get the timing right and you destroy your enemy. They could've either designed the enemies in the same fashion: can only attack in certain openings. Or even easier: just have less open time between enemy's attacks, meaning you get like 3-4 attacks before the enemy launches the next one. This would've solved this issue and block no longer needed.

Super can be blocked. Again coming back to the previous point, if there were openings, this would make sense. But there aren't, so it's just random. Whoops he blocked it, good bye 1 minute of consistent collecting. Also they can be dodged when enemy does certain attacks, that's kind of understandable, but feels awful nonetheless. If every enemy was like mr. Pega, where you could do chip damage, when he does attacks, then this could be somewhat mitigated, but with most you can't.

Was funny when Glam Witch bugged out at 0 hp and I couldn't attack at all.
luckily she was the most fun boss to fight. Mr. Pega close second.

Certain attacks are too similar. Making it difficult to learn patterns. Millennium Cobra, Lord Worw and Evil Pico suffered the most from this. All of them took considerably longer to learn, then necessary. Worst was probably Worw, the knife attacks were all very similar.

There weren't enough enemy animations in a lot of the later phases. Millennium Cobra, that rare orb attack from Glam Witch and Master Xiglaz last rush. It's fine if the player character has these fast teleporting like animations, but not cool when I'm supposed to understand, how to avoid them. Trial and error shouldn't be the answer. It should be understandable from the visuals. I suppose a lot of other attacks were also quite cloudy. Took quite a bit of trying to get what I'm supposed to do.

From what I gathered, it doesn't matter what punch or direction you use, so that's also wasted effort. Could've just had one button and he does one of the punches at random. Only exception was Mr. Pega, had to punch high.

And of course the ending was a little bull. Did you seriously just sell a game that ends with a trailer for the DLC? Kind of bad.

But in the end it was still fun, just not "spend 10h trying to beat a single boss" fun(only spent 5h on Rico :p). Art is fantastic, enemies are varied and interesting. Music was okay, seemed to fit well enough. And the one point over Billion Beat, is that this one has actually fast menus, maximum praise on that front.

0:00 Rookie difficulty and ending (last boss doesn't have difficulty selector)
43:29 Javi Rico The beast difficulty begins
47:08 Back Breaker
01:01:32 Millennium Cobra
01:47:50 Glam Witch
02:09:55 Lord Worw
04:14:37 Evil Rico training arc begins
07:34:42 Mr. Pega
08:02:25 Evil Rico continues, no victory in sight

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