Player Preview - Rising Thunder

Title: Rising Thunder
Developer: Radiant Entertainment
Status: Technical Alpha

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1MX2rgE

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the free to play fighting game, Rising Thunder, developed by Radiant Entertainment the same guys that are currently still developing their first game, Stonehearth.

Rising Thunder puts you in control of fighting robots in a setting and style quite similar to that seen in Real Steel with a touch of old school transformers. Each robot and its pilot are based on countries with Mexico, South Korea, Russia, China and Greece currently featured in the game. They are all uniquely voice acted in their countries native language and take on certain characteristics from their respective countries too for instance the American bot is a boxer, the Chinese bot is a Samurai and the Greek bot is a Spartan Warrior.

The fighting mechanics of the game provide you with a light, medium and heavy basic attack to work with as your bread and butter move set that is pretty similar in their functions throughout the roster of robots. Your move sets start to become a little bit more unique with each bots 3 special moves. These moves are a lot more powerful than your standard attacks so they are balanced via cooldowns so you’ll have to time them appropriately. Special move 2 is the only move in the specials that serves the same function across all characters aimed at denying aerial attacks. There is also an ultimate move that can only be used once your ultimate bar is filled from attacking your opponent. This move is extremely powerful and provides for some interesting camera angles while pulling it off. This move can be blocked, dodged or both so timing again is extremely important especially as the recovery time after performing this move is quite significant leaving you wide open to attacks. The special moves and ultimate move are all interchangeable in what looks to be a 2 skill option for each move slot, only a couple of the characters in the game have multiple choices at the moment but more are being added with every patch. 

Finally there are two utility moves you can perform the most important of which is block, by moving away from your opponent you automatically block any normal attacks, to block crouch attacks you will also have to crouch and move away and this will block almost everything except jump attacks. Lastly there is a grab that is primarily used to pull someone out of a block. Behind the scenes of the combat system is a 5 hit combo limit so there are no infinite combo loops which can be incredibly frustrating in other fighting games. There is also 2 combat styles that you can use, Kinetic Deflect and Kinetic Advance. Kinetic Deflect allows you to interrupt a combo consuming 1 bar of kinetic energy which you will only ever have 2 bars at the maximum. Kinetic energy regens slowly during a fight so you’re not limited to 2 bars for a round. Kinetic Advance allows for dash cancelling animations again, consuming 1 bar of kinetic energy.

For ranked mode, the only mode currently implemented, the rounds are a best of 3 and the match is also a best of 3. Between each match you will be able to switch out your special abilities and switch what kinetic combat mode you want to use. After each game you will gain or lose points depending on weather you won or lost that will affect your ranking that starts from carbon and goes all the way up to Diamond for 5 ranking levels total. There is also some signs of a progression system with an account level and character level gaining experience but currently nothing in the game that can really be unlocked which brings me to the free to play model. While the model hasn’t been implemented yet, Radiant Entertainment has said that they plan on a purely cosmetic business model stating that they are aiming for something similar to DOTA 2’s business model. So what we can gather from that is that all characters will be available free of charge along with all their abilities and variants thereof but you will have the option of kitting them out with different parts and pieces.

Other features of the game include full keyboard support and in fact is focused on making it as playable as possible for keyboard users providing movement on the wasd keys and fighting abilities on u,I,o,j,k,l and semi colon, I’ll put up  a little graphic to show you guys a bit better. Personally I played the game on my Xbox 360 controller for that better playing position the only downside being that blocking is a little bit harder to do with a gamepads joystick then a keyboards key. Being an online game Rising Thunder implements a ping balancing mechanic were the game is slowed down to try and match the ping. It doesn’t really become a problem until around the 250+ ping mark were the game starts to enter into slideshow territory. Obviously this problem is something that won’t really happen all that often once the game actually releases and has a decent sized playerbase.

Altogether Rising Thunder is an extremely fun and competitive fighting game that even beginners to the genre will be able to get into with no confusing combos and of course no paid entry barrier so those that aren’t sure if they will enjoy a fighting game have nothing really to lose. For experienced fighting game players there are a lot of character play style similarities so if you already play a certain character in another fighting game it should be pretty easy to transfer over to a similar character in Rising Thunder. I highly recommend checking out the game for new players to the genre and old alike. The game is well polished and a ton of fun to play.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Rising Thunder. The game is currently in a technical alpha stage with no official release date as of yet. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you guys next time.