Rising Thunder Returns for One Last Hurrah With a Playable Build

Get the drinks ready!

Rising Thunder was a PC fighting game that went through public testing in 2016. The game was unique in the sense that it was a traditional 2D fighting game built from the ground up for PC players. The game also did something rather clever involving the technical skill required for fighting games, and that was to get rid of it completely. Gone were the half-circle motions and long complicated combo buttons – instead, the game opted for a more “MOBA” like approach. Fighters’ special moves could be thrown out at the simple press of a button, but they had cooldowns, which means that the same fighting game strategy and tactics were still in effect.

Rising Thunder won over a fair crowd with its accessibility and emphasis on the in-depth meta play of a fighting game rather than the technical aspects. It was quickly growing in popularity and, had it continued, it may have even been the standout PC free-to-play game for the fighting game genre. It would have done what League of Legends did for the MOBA genre, if you will.

Which is actually ironic now that everything has passed! Sometime earlier this year, Radiant Entertainment – the creators of Rising Thunder – was acquired by Riot Games, the team behind League of Legends. Many fans of RT were not pleased with this development, as this meant that the game was probably going to get canceled so the team could work on a new project with Riot Games.

This seemed to be the case until recently one of the developers from Radiant spoke up on the official Rising Thunder subreddit. Rising Thunder lives again! A new “Community Edition” will be coming in January. This version of the game adds offline play with bots and versus play against local players, which is something players were asking for before the game got canceled. The source code for an open-source version of the Rising Thunder server will be included as well, meaning you can play online again! Of course, since it’s open-source, you can expect some modders to jump on this.

As big fans of the game when it originally came out, we’re extremely excited at this announcement. We can’t wait to jump back into the robot fighting game one more time, and we’re also excited for whatever new project the team is working on currently.

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