Rising Thunder

Rising Thunder, I don’t know where to start so I’ll just throw everything in, in a condensed version. It’s super slick, fast, beautiful, exciting and not at all about giant robots! However, you should not consider the latter to be its selling point, the pivot on which gameplay revolves. No, Rising Thunder is built to be a fighting game that’s about reflexes, quick thinking and pure skill.

Rising Thunder is built by veterans of the fighting genre, and that’s felt the moment you get out of training mode and enter a ranked match against someone who has a few fights behind them. It doesn't take much to get past the wonderful aesthetics of the bots, although it’s always a delight to the eyes, but once you do, you understand just how important skill is.

Each robot has a series of moves, high to low impact, and three special ones. There’s also the ultimate move, but that’s going to be a sure miss if you don’t have a good opening for it. In total, there are twelve keys, you have ten fingers, and if you’ve played a few fighting games in your time, you know that there is a lot to expect from Rising Thunder in terms of moves variety and combos.

At first, you might not see that but play against an adversary that’s a bit over you tier level, thanks matchmaking, and you’ll get what it has to offer. Also, while other fighting games offer a loadout for character aesthetics, Rising Thunder does that for moves.

Rising Thunder does hog a lot of resources, so you need a bit of hardware to be able to fully enjoy this beauty. It’s probably the only issue I can think of for this title, mostly considering that right now it’s in a technical alpha stage. The demand for juice does produce a bit of lag but again, alpha stage of development. As a note, I’ve experienced a bit of lag in two out of twenty matches.

Now, back to the experience. The fighters themselves, are envisioned and built around the cultures that created them, and they look perfect. Each robot is teeming with personality and aesthetic features that make them totally badass. They look so good I don’t really care if later on in the game Kaiju are introduced.

If you have some experience with fighting games, you’ll see that Rising Thunder is not about jumping and kicking until you land a hit. That’s reserved for novices. Rising Thunder makes it possible to unleash your technical side of fighting and instincts. You cheer for yourself for every successful combo and hold your breath when on the defensive.

To end, Rising Thunder has most of what any fighting game fan wants. Gameplay that requires skill, fluid combat animations, spectacular combos and special moves and much more, even if some of that is on the way.