Thunderflash is a highly competent, if uninspired release. While I enjoyed my hour long playthrough and a round or two of Survival mode, I couldn’t help but feel that the release as a whole was a missed opportunity to not only bring back the Run ‘n Gun genre, but to innovate and create something more complex. Still, as a co-op experience, it is well worth playing but unfortunately will be forgotten soon after completion.

Conceivably, more and better guns would make Thunderflash more interesting…but at the same time, this is a game where you just move forward constantly if you want to win. There’s only so much more interesting it can get. That may have been enough 35 years ago, and it may still be enough for people who miss those days of gaming, but in present day, it just feels kind of lacklustre.

Thunderflash does a good job of mimicking some classic arcade games and offers the player decent, and challenging, run and gun action but you can bypass a lot of that challenge by running past a lot of the enemies or with the game's generous stage select option. It's short-lived fun but fun nonetheless.