Maximum Thunderness is a roguelike shoot-em-up that promises the same vibe 'of a Saturday morning cartoon'
Overview & Key Takeaways
That's a lot of bright colours.
We just got our first look at Maximum Thunderness during today's PC Gaming Show, and this shoot-em-up roguelike looks just as chaotic as it sounds—with giant green goop aliens, tanks, and more explosions than a Michael Bay film.
Maximum Thunderness is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up roguelike that its developer, Berzerk Studios, promises will deliver "the energy and aesthetic of a Saturday morning cartoon—sugary cereal-induced fever dream." Something that, by the looks of this trailer it almost certainly delivers on.
It's been a good couple of decades since I watched Saturday morning cartoons, but I have to say this does kind of remind me of that feeling of sitting down at the weekend and seeing what's on Cartoon Network, Toonami, or Kix—good times.
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But this roguelike isn't just a tornado of colours and bullets, it's also a co-op game, so you can enjoy all of this with your friends. You all work together, killing green alien monsters and blowing up every single thing in your path as you make your way across the 2D map.
But it's not just one straight road. The map has multiple branches as players can take different routes across the city and gain different buffs as they go along, such as Super Defender which gives you +4 shield and +1 shield regen, Incendiary Bullet which gives each bullet a +2% chance to create a fireball (that must be where all those explosions are coming from), and Chain Reaction which increases the Lazrifle damage by +4 for the rest of that stage when overheating.
Then with each stage you complete you can get more cash and an upgrade booster pack with different kinds of perks, like the ones above, to choose from. Which will hopefully make your run a little easier.
But as is the case with roguelike, if you die then all that progress and the perks are lost. You'll need to start again from square one with a fresh slate, which means new perks,and maybe some of your old favourites—if you're lucky.
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Berzerk Studios has been bringing "creative, polished, and most of all, fun games filled with humour, headbanging tunes and sometimes, gallons of gratuitous violence" for over a decade now. With 30 games published, Maximum Thunderness is its next venture into the bloody foray of action games yet again and it's set to release this autumn, and there's a Steam demo you can try out now.
