The reality of the game Thunder Tier One does not live up to expectations at all

Thunder Tier One review - what frustrations await you in the process 18 / 01 / 22 William Hunter Visitors: 566 Rating: ★★★

Thunder Tier One wants to show off with realism and tactical combat. Krafton, Inc., which is best known as the developer of the battle royales Playerunknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG for short), is trying to use their accumulated shooter expertise and convince again with exciting gun battles.

You can now find out why the principle and all the approaches are actually convincing, but we still had more frustration in our test than we really had fun with.

Thunder beast what?

First, let's get into how Thunder Tier One actually works. You grab a group of four soldiers and fight a terrorist organization with them. The various missions range from rescuing hostages to defusing bombs and capturing and holding a military base. Everything you would expect from such a setting is given.

At least the maps can convince with variation. So you are sometimes in caves or similar on the way. Source: PC games The focus is of course on the gun battles, in which tactical action is required, since you are always far outnumbered with your small group of four men. So you have to sneak through buildings, destroy enemy devices and of course eliminate opponents. Everything, of course, as quietly and undiscovered as possible.

You can either team up with up to three other players to do this, or you can have AI-controlled allies at your side. Here we come to the biggest problem that Thunder Tier One brings with it: the AI.
Dumb, Dumber, Thunder Tier One AI

Rarely do you see such an incomplete AI these days, and it's particularly noticeable because you're heavily dependent on your fellow combatants throughout the missions. In many places it feels like the allies are trying to effectively ally against you.

The AI also likes to leave the protective building to be shot down right in front of the door. Source: PC Games The problems here range from the sheer stupidity of the AI allies to simply totally ill-considered and broken behavior systems. The fact that the AI cannot take cover properly, often runs out behind it for no reason or likes to go head first into completely hopeless situations and logically dies only a few seconds later, is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is theoretically possible to give orders to allied soldiers and thus enforce your own will, but this is so cumbersome and counterintuitive that it only makes things worse.

For example, you can give the whole squad the order to cover, which ensures that the soldiers randomly attach themselves to nearby objects and do not even begin to consider the enemy's position. They often then position themselves perfectly in the enemy's line of fire, which easily misses the point of taking cover.

The function is therefore completely useless and you have to order all your fellow combatants individually to the respective positions. At least that works much more reliably, but is of course much more cumbersome in a combat and stressful situation and has to be adjusted again and again for every danger that approaches from another direction.

But the problems are just as present on the offensive. The advance is broken as is the cover system. The characters (usually) arrive at their destination sooner or later, but they also like to make a small detour from time to time.

Already in the tutorial, the clunky control of the group members is noticeable.

Already in the tutorial, the clunky control of the group members is noticeable. Source: PC Games So if you are in an important situation where every second counts to get to a certain point, but then the allies take a short walk through a small forest, run into an enemy camp, shot down become and die.

Instead of having fellow combatants who help you in battle and ensure that you see yourself as the real leader of a special forces unit, you feel more like a babysitter in a war zone who has to do whatever it takes to keep his charges alive. You can't just storm off alone, otherwise you simply don't have the firepower to survive some of the gun battles.

So the community is the great hope for a better future of Thunder Tier One, since the developers want to actively promote mods.

That all sounded very negative. It is, but we can recommend Thunder Tier One under very specific circumstances, but only then. In four-player co-op, many of the criticisms go away, then you can have a good time with the game; even then it's just a mediocre experience with much better alternatives on the market.


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