An example of great game design! Thunder Paw Review

Thunder Paw is an amazing game that I 
am thoroughly enjoying at the moment.
The levels are well balanced and hand crafted 
and the game does an excellent job of warning  
you of dangers in subtle ways, for example 
when the platforms you jump on to suddenly  
decide to shudder a few levels in. It’s 
obvious that these are less stable than  
the platforms we’ve seen before, and they’re 
going to fall. And when you suddenly see large  
red exclamation marks that indicates danger. 
Before this point the game actually actively  
encouraged me to jump down into the unknown, 
but now it’s very clear that I shouldn’t do  
that here. Overall it feels like a lot of care and 
attention has been put into each and every level.  
The game teaches the player what they need to know 
one bit at a time through ingenious level design.
One of the things I first do in any 
new game is go into the options,  
and I noticed a difficulty setting. It defaulted 
to easy and I’m glad I left it on that level.  
Even at easy difficulty the game was 
punishingly difficult in a good, fun way.  
You get four hit points and any time you 
get hit by an enemy or their weapon it  
takes one of those away. When you reach zero 
hit points you respawn at the last checkpoint.  
This is particularly punishing when I reached the 
first boss, I kept dying over and over and over.
I feel the boss

fight really brings out a few
of the other things that are fantastic about
this game. A game is fun when a player feels that
their deaths are their own fault. I died countless
times to this boss and every single time it
was clear exactly what I’d done wrong, so I
respawned determined to do better next time. And
with that simple mechanic I wasn’t able to put the
game down. The boss fight in particular was very
engaging and I really, really wanted to defeat
this guy. And he made me work for it too, which
made the eventual victory even more rewarding. One
thing i liked about this boss fight in particular
was that he had the exact same movement speed
as me, which led to several moments where i was
just running ahead of him trying to give myself
time to think, to jump out of the way. It made me
feel like every single movement I made, mattered.
To complete a level you need to defeat every
enemy, and that brings me to one small gripe
or complaint that iI have about this game
– sometimes, it can be hard to even find
the last few enemies. You end up moving
around the level just looking for them.
But the game does a good job of leaving around
little hints, like a little ledge underneath the
bridge for example, which communicates to me the
fact that you can actually go below the bridge
by pressing down on the controls.
Before I noticed that I didn’t even
know that was possible. And that’s
where the last bad guy was hiding.
You can go back and replay levels, so
when I had technical issues in my first
recording I had to go and re-record
the clips that you see in this video,
but I didn’t mind playing those levels again
– they were still fun the second time around.
Thunder Paw is available on
Nintendo Switch, Xbox One,
Playstation 4 and PS Vita. There’s 20 different
levels and 5 different biomes to explore,
beautiful pixel art graphics, you can upgrade
your gun by collecting gems from enemies,
and you take on five dynamic bosses
that each offer a unique challenge.
It was released in March 2020 and
costs $5 USD on all platforms.
It’s a singleplayer only arcade platformer,
and I would highly recommend it.
I will only make videos for
games that I genuinely enjoy,
so if you want to discover more great
games or you’re interested in Minecraft
(which is the main focus of this channel),
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