Thumper

Tried out Thumper today. I remember seeing it get praised on multiple game news sites, which might have been the reason I picked it up. As seems to be the trend here recently though, I'm not actually a fan of the base genre it's from - rhythm games. I'll try to give you my thoughts on it as unbiased as I can regardless.

So Thumper is a rhythm game where this beetle-like thing is speeding across a linear track, and you gotta press the right buttons at the right times. Turns, notes, barriers, jumps, or maybe they were something else. You see, Thumper's a bit abstract and has very confusing and overbearing visuals and music. The thematics have been turned up to eleven, but at its heart it's still just about pressing up-down-left-right-space at the right times - nothing complicated. There's, I think, 9 stages, with roughly 20 levels each, and a bossfight (which is just a non-fixed length track) at the end of each, and maybe in the middle or somewhere else too sometimes.

However, from its thematic arises my main issue with it. I can't actually see or hear the audio and/or visual cues for what I'm supposed to do at times. Usually, the visual cues shouldn't be as important, but Thumper doesn't always let you keep pressing buttons, with how large the spacing between actions sometimes is, making you lose the rhythm. This really strikes me as something a rhythm game shouldn't do. Sure, as far as the audiovisuals go, Thumper stands out, but I don't understand why people would let it sacrifice the gameplay for that purpose.

Overall, Thumper looks and feels quite unique, but that's just a facade. It has the same old simple rhythm gameplay underneath, and even that isn't executed all that well. I don't like Thumper and wouldn't recommend it, and I don't think that's even my distaste for rhythm games talking. It just wasn't that good.