With so much excitement surrounding the soon-to-be-released Thor movie, I recently got a chance to get my hands on the Nintendo DS version of Thor: God of Thunder. Of course, Thor: God of Thunder will be releasing on the same week as the film, and it will be releasing on all the major platforms. The Nintendo DS version of the game is obviously way different from the console versions of the game, and with that said, I thought I would fill you in on what you should expect from this title.

The folks at WayForward is the team that worked on the DS version of Thor, and it is a side-scrolling 2D beat 'em up title that is very strict on the 2D aspect. It is so strictly 2D that there isn't any depth mobility whatsoever. Even two-decade old classics like Double Dragons and Final Fight allowed you to move more than just on a 2D plane. The game made me feel very claustrophobic and limited, especially when many enemies would be on the screen at once. This aspect of the game also made it feel very easy to defeat many enemies at once; since there's no depth, enemies bunched up together in perfect little groups.

To fight off enemies, you can pummel them by pressing the attack button and any direction for different moves. You can also throw your hammer, and charge up attacks with various combinations of tapping different directions and holding one of the attack buttons at the same time. Throw in the fact that you can super-jump to the top screen, grab giant pieces of rubble and enemies, and what you have is a good amount of variety that makes the game not feel like your typical run-of-the-mill beat 'em up.

As you defeat enemies, they will drop for you health and special meter points to fill up each respective bar. These specials fill up the whole screen and use up half of the special meter to pull off. There are multiple different special you can pull off by tapping the screen, but they all inflict the same amount of damage. That's right, having different specials only makes it fun to mix things up, but it's good to see them trying to change it up in a genre that is plagued with repetition.

The boss battles I played were all pretty enjoyable. I played three different bosses, and they were all challenging and fun. All the bosses had a unique twist at the end, and a unique use of both the top and bottom screen.

Overall, I say that this game has shaped up to be one of the better movie-based videogames, especially as the adopted step brother of the console versions of Thor.