L - R, Rick and Stan.
Thunderflash is a retraux style shooter made by Ratalaika Games and SEEP, described by the creators as a "love letter" to old-school, Run-and-Gun arcade games from the 80s, with Ikari Warriors being the main inspiration.
When a terrorist syndicate known as the "Bloody Wolf" stole numerous superweapons from the US Defense Department, two elite operatives from the Thunderflash Division, Rick and Stan, are dispatched to stop them. When Intel managed to locate the Bloody Wolf's headquarters in Kashmir, both Rick and Stan (or one of them on single-player) will launch a one-man assault.
Thunderflash contains examples of:
- Action Bomb: The floating robotic skull-probes in the second stage. They don't have any ranged weapons, with their sole attack being coming at you with a tackle and exploding on contact.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Most of the bosses are vulnerable in a single spot, which the game will throw onscreen hints prior to the battle (a green crosshair with the words "TARGET" on it).
- Battle in the Rain: The battle in the village is set during a downpour. Ironically (or not), the stage's boss attacks you with a flamethrower.
- Climbing Climax: The game's final stage requires you to scale the terrorist army's command tower by climbing up via it's side, with windows on your left and right having mooks which sticks out to shoot at you. The whole climbing sequence can take up to several minutes, even if you breeze through the whole thing without killing anybody along the way.
- Excuse Plot: There are terrorists, they have superweapons, and you need to kill all of them to prevent the weapons from being used.
- Exploding Barrels: Several barrels can be seen in the enemy's camps. The red ones are highly volatile and explodes into a small mushroom cloud doing damage to everything within it's proximity (including you) while the blue and green barrels averts the trope by simply breaking apart.
- Fire-Breathing Weapon:
- The Flamethrower, one of the early obtainable power-ups which averts Video Game Flamethrowers Suck by easily hitting the other side of the screen each blast and roasting every mook in the way.
- On the other hand, terrorists armed with flamethrowers starts showing up in the village level. As does the stage's boss.
- Jet Pack: One of the side-scrolling levels have you putting on a rocket pack and flying through the air while shooting at other jetpack-equipped, airborne enemies.
- Mirror Match: Prizrak, the boss of the mountains area, fights without using a mech or armored vehicles, unlike the other bosses. He simply hovers around while dropping projectiles on you while creating barriers around himself, and somehow his health is as strong as the others (though his supernatural powers might have something to do with it).
- Mission Control: Your lieutenant, Lory, will sometimes contact you in-between levels for providing briefing.
- Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: The terrorist army you spend the whole game battling must be the most poorly-equipped terrorist army in the world, considering most of their lowest-ranked grunts (those guys in green fatigues) comes at you... armed with two dinky little knives. While your default weapon is a machine-gun. You do the math.
- One-Man Army: In single-player mode, befitting a homage to old-school arcade games.
- Plasma Cannon: The plasma launcher is one of the game's better weapons collected halfway through, which fires bolts of fast-moving green plasma at a rapid pace.
- Segmented Serpent: A robotic serpent whose body comes in a series of round spheres shows up as the boss of the river stage. It's weak spot is the head, though oddly enough hitting the "body" part of the spheres can damage the boss. And as it gets increasingly damaged the spheres blows up one by one starting from the tail-end, making it increasingly difficult to hit.
- Sentry Gun:
- The game have a few of these installed as enemies, and are mostly quite useless due to being a Fixed Forward-Facing Weapon built on walls - you can simply shoot back from a diagonal angle without worrying about getting hit.
- The snow mountains stage have a quartet of gun towers as an obstacle you need to destroy to proceed.
- Shadow of Impending Doom: Be wary when the game throws the shadow of a massive bomber plane. The terrorists are attempting to carpet-bomb the area to take you out, make a run for it!
- Shout-Out:
- The terrorist organization based in Kashmir, which you're tasked with dismantling? Bloody Wolf, another classic 80s-style shooter.
- The game's title also bears a resemblance to another old classic, Thunder Fox. Both titles being the codenames of the player's elite commando squad.
- Shows Damage: There's an avatar display of your current character on the side of the screen, which shows his current health status. Suffering too many hits and his face starts getting increasingly bruised and bloodied. Pick up a health boost and the avatar goes back to normal.
- Spread Shot: Another power-up, which fires spreads of three shots in an arc. Though you can expect most bosses to have cannons capable of firing projectiles in an arc, too.
- Take It to the Bridge: One stage in the winter level iss et entirely on a bridge crawling with enemies, that you need to clear in order to proceed.
