Reviews

Following the commercial success of Scooby Doo, Gargoyle produced another game for another of Elite's big license deals. Legend has it that, once again, the in-house team was running late with an overambitious concept, and the nearly-finished Samurai Dawn got a swift makeover to plug the gap.

Although essentially another scrolling beat 'em up, they were much more successful in capturing the feel of the show this time, due in part to its more action oriented nature.

You play the role of the sword-wielding Lion-O and, guess what? Your mission is to rescue the rest of the team whilst fending off constant attacks from an assortment of enemies. To add a bit of variety, there are bonus weapons and a flying car you can pick up to help you on your way.

Graphically, it's up there with the best of Gargoyle's games with some excellent background details, animated characters and great use of colour, although this does necessitate rather jerky scrolling.

It's a more successful effort than Scooby Doo, but still a game that felt as though it was missing some of the depth that I'd usually associate with the best from Gargoyle games.

The much-loved cartoon gets a game on the ZX Spectrum......and you'll never guess what???.......it's actually really good! It's graphically great, plays really well and the music by the brilliant Rob Hubbard is outstanding! I wasn't honestly expecting much from this game so it's quality left me felling rather surprised. Thumbs up.

Quite nice but its intense difficulty would put you off, and so too would the random deaths, I died once immediately after respawning down a hole, how unfair can one game get? In spite of this it's not bad at all. Its title music though I could listen to all day.

I loved Thundercats from the first time I played it: pure, no-nonsense action coupled with great graphics and animation and an increasing level of difficulty which, far from being frustrating, takes you into the realms of that dangerous land known as 'just-one-more-go'.

Probably the most arcade-oriented title programmed by Gargoyle Games, Thundercats is licensed from a cartoon series that was briefly shown down here as well. I have no knowledge of that and therefore cannot say anything about it capturing the feel of the series or just being an arcade game with a superficial Thundercats gloss. Whatever it might be, this is an excellent game and I still enjoy it as much as I did in 1988.

Thundercats Hoooooooo!

Or just "Ho" as in whoring a fucking shit cartoon into a shit game.

I still to this day have no idea why this simplistic, boring, half baked bollocks of a game has even half the acclaim it has?

Yeah the scrolling is great.

Yeah the graphics look about a 7/10 or some shit like that...

But the game is complete wank, and I mean complete and utter wank. Run along chop, run along chop, run along chop has no effect on tiny enemy...DIE!

Repeat for 10 million levels till you maybe find Mumm-Ra if you're lucky.

Lather rinse repeat.

For all the people that say this game is great I'm right here to tell them "Fuck off! It's generic shite!". Hobgoblin by Shatlantis is better, and I'm not even joking!

Well, pretty ace, isn't it.
3,75/5

Thundercats is one of those games that for me feels like a missed opportunity.

On the surface it looks good, some nice graphics and detail and I absolutely love the title music, another timeless classic from Rob Hubbard. Kind of funny he produced some good legendary stuff on the Spectrum given he absolutely hated the sound chip.

But the gameplay can be best described as an anti-climax. You have your sword and you’re hitting the baddies with it and more often than not you will be killed by the sheer swarmth of them. You also need to jump over gaps to avoid falling, but even then you are liable to wind up jumping directly into an enemy in the process.

You also have a power ball to collect during the levels beginning with level 2 and this is more effective than the sword. I'm sure it had a proper name but my memory's escaped me.

All this is done until you reach the end of the level of which you need to reach before the time limit for a bonus. You also got a kill bonus depending on how many kills you got during the level.

Thundercats did not need to be a race to the checkpoint-style game. I get that it's meant to make the game play with a fast pace but given Gargoyle Games were widely known for their adventure-type games Thundercats could quite easily have been another one of their epic adventure-style games.

But instead it's a game where the main ojective is not to kill as many enemies as you can but rather to reach the finish as quickly as possible. Again, Thundercats did not need to be this kind of game.

But I think the main thing to remember is that Thundercats as a product was conceived very late into development. Initially this was written as a very separate game called Samurai Dawn. It's not the first time Elite have change a game late for the sake of a licence. James Bond's Live and Let Die was initially written as Aquablast before the Bond licence as acquired very late into development and thus the change was made.

This was possibly similar since according to a previous review Samurai Dawn was nearly finished but eventually never released.

Thundercats isn't a bad game in general but it just felt like it could have been so much better if it was made like a proper adventure rather than a rushy race to the checkpoint game.

Indeed it's possibly the most arcade game Gargoyle produced, but did it really need to be an arcade game?

Like I said at the start, a missed opportunity.