Lightening Force

THE BAD:
Incredibly hard
Backgrounds merge with enemies and enemy fire

SUMMARY:
Thunder Force IV was also known as Lightening Force, with the typo. Though it’s only cosmetic, it does kind of symbolise this game. In my opinion it falls way short of the previous game in the series and I’ll elaborate why.

First off, it’s another side scrolling shooter with the same principle as the last game, though some of the weapons have changed, the pods that accompany you are still in the game and do the same job as before, which is to fire when you fire and block some enemy shots. The new weapons include “Free Way” which is a simple laser blast in one direction, but rockets behind you and at 45 degerees up and down. The interesting thing about this weapon is that the rockets fire in the opposite direction to the one you last pressed. So to fire forwards, you need to move the ship back slightly. “Snake” is a weapon that fires above and below you and when it hits a surface it will travel along that surface until it hits an enemy or goes off screen. This is virtually useless early on but the later levels have frequent ceilings and floors where this weapon becomes handy. “Hunter” is the other weapon, which homes onto enemies much like the previous game.

Again like the previous game, the enemies change on each level so it’s impossible to describe them all. Most are vulnerable from all sides but some enemies, usually bosses and sub-bosses, are only weak in certain areas. You can tell this area because the colour of the explosions created when a weapon hits the area will be yellow/orange as opposed to blue. But here lies the problem, some weapons don’t give this telltale colour change, so you can spend a long time firing and doing no damage without realising it.

But a much bigger problem is my overall biggest hate of the game. The colours of the explosions often merge with the colours of the scenery so it often becomes difficult to tell if you’re hitting the right area. But also, enemy fire and even enemy ships can be partially cloaked by the background. There’s nothing like the level of clarity there was in Thunder Force II and Thunder force III. This gets very frustrating when you get hit and lose a life from a shot that you barely knew was coming. Maybe this contributes to the overall difficulty of the game, but the game is extremely hard. I’ve only ever been able to complete it by starting off with 99 lives. I didn’t lose all of them but I did lose about 20 and it’s very frustrating because most of the losses come from ships or enemy fire that I could hardly see.

There are 10 levels to this game so it is actually longer than the last game, but the fact it’s so hard only makes that annoying. I’d rather have had 10 levels in TFIII and 7 levels + final boss in this game. At the end of mission 5 you get a swarm of allies to help you take down a boss and your ship is then transformed into a different one. It contains all the same properties as the original ship, but when you have your pods (also different but do the same job) if you don’t fire for a while you will charge up a powerful laser attack that will send you back as a recoil as well as causing massive damage to any enemies caught in the blast. This attack proves very helpful, especially on bosses if you’re able to not get hit for that long. I felt it was a nice touch and partially compensated for the enormous difficulty of the game.

The game isn’t bad, but it could have been made a great deal better by the graphics being improved so everything didn’t blend together. It’s very frustrating, the colours aren’t as bold as TFIII which some people might like, but being hit by something you can’t even see coming is something that will annoy most people. Of course it’s not entirely invisible, but there’s often so much going on at once that it’s hard to keep track especially if you don’t have any powerful weapons handy. So the difficulty might annoy people, but it’s worth a shot if you liked TFIII.