![]() It helps that Thunderbow is relatively short: I plowed through the game in a few hours, before the mechanics and bright colors lost their luster.ĭuring each level, light butt-rock is pumped through your speakers while a monster truck derby announcer growls catchphrases like, “Unstoppable!" and “Mass Destruction!" This isn’t a criticism as much as it is an example of the game’s aesthetic as a whole. The levels were tough enough to give me pause - especially because players must collect bananas (three per level) to unlock content - but I never felt frustrated or stumped. The tough part is finding the chink in each level’s armor, but the execution of your Rube-Goldbergian air-strike is generally straightforward. The flipside of Thunderbow‘s precision is that it skews toward being a little too easy. With top notch visual and aural feedback, the simple act of crushing a screen full of scorpions with boulders can be very satisfying. The game rewards patience, precision, and attention to detail, and the levels are compact enough that two or three well-placed arrows will bring the whole house of cards down. With the smaller scope comes a focus on precision - lining up Monkey’s shots isn’t a matter of swiping as much as it is small, discrete adjustments, complemented by razor-sharp controls.Īs a result, player intent is never compromised - you can see exactly what you need to do, and Thunderbow provides the necessary controls to pull it off. More specifically, the levels feel smaller and more compact than the ones found in, say, Angry Birds - none of them are larger than one screen. It’s all standard stuff for the physics-slingshot genre, but Thunderbow is so refined and enjoyable that it never feels stale. at exploding barrels and supporting structures. Our primate protagonist accomplishes this by shooting a variety of ammunition - pineapples that explode like cluster bombs, bundle of mosquitoes that splinters into individual kamikaze dive-bombers, etc. Even the MMO overlay - after completing certain achievements, Monkey Quest players can collect new gear - is unintrusive, and Thunderbow seems fully-realized despite the ancillary tie-in. There are no frills here, just one monkey on a quest to squish scorpions with his thunderbow and physics-enabled exploding carrot-arrow s. That same type of restraint carries over to the game design itself. ![]() Children’s media tends to be overblown and moralistic, full of uplifting melodramas or cautionary tales, but there’s not a word of dialogue or narrative in Thunderbow, only beautifully illustrated storyboards introducing its next enemies. My favorite thing about Thunderbow (that name!) is how self-aware and understated it is (those aren’t adjectives people generally use to describe licensed games). After you beat the 30 available levels - more are, supposedly, coming soon - you can play a few bonus rounds with a girl-monkey who shoots lightning bolts out of her electric guitar-bow. The hero of the game is a nameless monkey who carries a bow-and-arrow. It would be easier to find Thunderbow distasteful if it weren’t so radical, born out of the same mid-90s fever dream that brought us anthropomorphic turtles who were also ninjas. ![]() It’s also where a giant corporation like Nickelodeon can sell us an Angry Birds clone to advertise its kid-friendly MMO, Monkey Quest. ![]() ![]() It’s a low-risk way to capitalize on experimental games like Sword & Sworcery, a place where Andreas Illiger, the one-man dev team behind Tiny Wings, can sell thousands of copies. Games like Monkey Quest: Thunderbow disrupt the feel-good media narrative we like to tell about the App Store. ![]()
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