4 Wheel Thunder
Description official descriptions
4 Wheel Thunder is the off-road racing sequel to the power-boat racing game Hydro Thunder.
In this game, players race around two types of courses; huge outdoor tracks and smaller indoor tracks. All in all, there are 24 areas in which to race, including various day/night and rain/sunshine variations. The game includes the standard championship, practice race, and two player modes.
The Thunder series of games is unique in that the key to winning the race lies not in careful steering and braking, instead focusing more in finding the boost power-ups that lie around the tracks. Each boost icon adds a few seconds of time to your boost meter. The player then can press a boost button to increase the speed of the truck dramatically. Without using boost power-ups, the player has no chance of winning a race.
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 78% (based on 19 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 6 ratings with 1 reviews)
Fast Glitzy but largely underwhelming
The Good
4 Wheel Thunder is (sadly?) the best 4x4 racer for the PAL Dreamcast with some very nice aspects to it, the most striking, being the overall graphical quality to the title, especially for a first gen DC game, 4WT has a well structured main game which for those are prepared to endure it, will last them for many a night against grueling CPU racers. The game boasts a very impressive multiplayer mode with a variety of different modes from racing a bomb. Solid 60fps is a big +!
The Bad
Sadly, originally developed as a pure 4X4 Dreamcast racer by Kalisto, Midway liked the look of it, and decided they wanted to add it to their Thunder brand which they were trying to establish, however, to do this, meant they had to add boosts, now a trade mark of the franchise, and made the AI so that you needed to get the boost to have any chance of even finishin close to the CPU racers. Utter Cack uninspiring music. The final downer is it is such a wasted oppertunity, 4x4 games have such potential for interesting and rugged wide open terrain, puttin the vehicles through their paces, with multiple routes to checkpoints huge distances away, sadly very few games acctually take advantage of this. 4 Wheel Thunder is one of them, generally, most circuits would be possible in a Renault Clio never mind a Monster Truck or SUV.
The Bottom Line
Fast, mildly entertaining 4 wheel drive arcade style racing game, with plenty to do, well worth the £5 it generally costs even brand new these days despite some serious flaws in game design.
Dreamcast · by Mike Rogers (5) · 2002
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4 Wheel Thunder at Midway
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by quizzley7.
Additional contributors: deepcut, Kayburt.
Game added July 15, 2001. Last modified March 19, 2024.