Thunderscape is the first of the two games set in the World of Aden. A 3D dungeon crawler, you start by creating a party of four characters using an original classless ruleset, with nine races, five attributes and 18 skills – including a few non-combat ones, such as Pickpockets, Lockpick, Fast Talk and Xenology.

You're then taken to the bottom of a valley, where begins your quest to stop the Nocturnal army. While the graphics aren't impressive, with brown muted colours and poor draw distance, it's a fun start, as you climb the valley coming across a shop, an elevator, secrets, riddles and two NPCs you can recruit.

The combat system is especially well-designed. Turn-based but fast, thanks to the efficient interface and quick animations, it also offers a great deal of options. There are over 20 combat moves, such as Berserk Attack, Mighty Blow, Kick, Shoot, Shield Bash, Feign, Aim for Vitals, Block Enemy Advance, Dodge Backstab and even the Fast Talk skill to bribe or confuse enemies. Spells can also be tuned, as you can set how much mana to spend when casting them.

It's a depth rarely seen in dungeon crawlers, but, unfortunately, it's wasted on the game's poor content. Most enemies are too easy and stupid to force you to fully use the combat system. Add a lot of backtracking plus rapidly respawning enemies and after a while you'll get bored and just auto-attack everything.

And while the first area is content-rich, most others are giant, featureless maze-like levels that just require you to randomly explore until you find the key, item or lever you need to open the next level.

While it was innovative, Thunderscape feels like a shade of a much better game. Great systems are in place, but the content fails to take advantage of them, offering instead an easy, dull and repetitive experience. At least the guitar-driven soundtrack is excellent.