Thor: God of Thunder

It's this, more than anything, that ensures the experience is incapable of rising above even the most basic level of mediocrity. This is a genre populated by lithe, agile warriors – Ryu, Kratos and friends – and Thor's lumbering approach to fighting makes him a hopelessly poor substitute.

Even the presentation feels half-finished. The graphics probably wouldn't trouble the PS2, with all the effort clearly directed at the whizz-bang eye candy of the various thunder and lightning special attacks. Even then, the repeated animations soon take the shine off that small pleasure, and all you're left with are woeful character models stiffly shambling through predictable locations. The game may delve into Norse realms untouched by the movie, but when they're used to bring us such fresh environments as a fire world, it's hardly worth getting excited.

Thor himself looks and moves like a stop-motion movie made with action figures. His hair is an unmoving yellow helmet surrounding his expressionless face, while his cape sticks down behind him like somebody left it on the washing line in winter. His nemesis, Loki, fares even worse. He looks for all the world like Data from Star Trek on his way to a chintzy medieval fayre. Both are voiced by the movie actors, Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleton, but neither seems very engaged with the process. Hemsworth, swaggering and fun on the cinema screen, sounds like he's being forced to read his lines at gunpoint.

And what does the game have to offer the hardy soul who sticks with it to the end? Nothing more than the usual array of pointless collectable trinkets hovering conspicuously in the corners of each area. Inevitably, grabbing these ekes out a few more pixels on Thor's health and power bars, though the effect is too small and the levels too cramped and linear to warrant any real searching. That said, some pick-ups do allow you to change the colour of Thor's lightning, a reward so pointless and random it's either a cunning commentary on the futility of such lazy fetch-quests, or is simply evidence of a weary designer saying, "Sod it, colourful lightning will have to do."

The tragedy, of course, is that Thor, the character, has all the ingredients required to make an acceptable action game. With a little more time, creative freedom and imaginative design it could even be a very good game. But that's not what happens with games like this. They get squeezed into restrictive schedules, smothered by fussy studio approval and shoved out into the world, half-baked and unloved, in the vain hope that enough people will like the movie to pick up a game with the same name on a whim.

It's a throwback to the licensed games of old; the identical parade of 8-bit platformers churned out by Ocean, the identikit cartoon side-scrollers of the SNES years. Maybe in 20 years time someone will look back on Thor with ironic fondness, a cheesy childhood memory from a more innocent time. For those of us living in the now, it's joyless tat and should be smashed with hammers. Big ones.