Thanks to Qubyte Games for the review code
Title: Thunder Hoop Collection
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 10/08/2026
Story
In Thunder Hoop, you take control of a goofy looking, living vaccine to the Genebreak virus, a devastatingly powerful virus that’s creating all sorts of bizarre monsters and inflicting them upon the world. In the sequel, years after defeating Dr Genebreak, he comes back with a horde of evil aliens and a grown up Thunder Hoop jumps back in the fray to fight them again.
Needless to say, neither of these have much plot worth caring about, but I will give TH2 credit for featuring a cool flashback scene to the end of the first game as part of its intro. Once again, Qubyte returns with another Piko compilation, this time being themed around Gaelco’s platformer series.
Presentation
The modern Qubyte wrapper makes a comeback here, doing just about what you’d expect by now; different screen sizes and filter options, save states, rewind, cheats, and a small gallery of poster scans, and even some descriptions about the two games on offer. Considering how there isn’t much else on offer besides the posters, Qubyte pretty much used all they could here.
The emulation for the Thunder Hoop duology here is fairly solid, which is nice to see considering MAME was infamous for having emulation bugs for the first game in particular for several years, including one that would crash the game upon dying on level 4. The crunchy audio and those compressed guitars sound as could as they ever could, and the weird graphics are still indeed, as strange as ever. Yes, that means Thunder Hoop’s hilariously loud death scream is also as loud as it should be. All in all, a pretty solid emulation treatment here.
Gameplay
Outside of the games themselves, you have those brief history blurbs, poster scans, in-game achievements, a sound test, (if you really want to hear hyper compressed guitars, or the oddly catchy theme to Stage 3 in Thunder Hoop 1) and some QOL features like remapping and cheat toggles.
The usual sort of features from the newer Qubyte Classics, meaning that yes, the input lag is far better and nothing like the earliest days of this line! Happy that such a thing is in the past, especially with how tricky these games can be.
Thunder Hoop: This Arcade game by Gaelco really wants your money, and no amount of QOL can really fix that design mindset. In this action platformer, you play as not-Goku, as you set out across multiple stages to defeat the evil Doctor’s experiments. Thunder Hoop can fire his weapon in multiple directions, pretty much just like Toki, if I had to directly compare how it felt controlling him. You can even do the silly bounce off enemies!
Unfortunately, the rest of Thunder Hoop makes it very clear it just wants your quarters, and you’ll be using the rewind feature here an awful lot if you want to see through to the end of the game. There is a memorization aspect here that could lead to getting good enough for a 1CC, but the game is pretty vicious straight out of the gate, with one hit deaths, stingy checkpoints, and enemies that like to spawn in tricky spots to immediately kill you.
One of the cheats here lets you toggle on any weapon upgrade and keep it full-time without having to have them time out, which I strongly encourage you do in order to have a chance at actually beating this game. I wish I could say this was a pretty fun, well balanced platformer, but this was a very weak game when I covered it back on Evercade, and the cheats and rewind honestly make this the best way you’ll ever play Thunder Hoop.
It’s not even good as a score chaser, due to the ridiculously high thresholds the game demands for high scores, and the poor scoring aspects of this game all around. Still, pumping in credits and making good usage of the QOL here, and you’ll at least have a mildly amusing time admiring the weirdness.
TH Strikes Back: Thunder Hoop 2: With the first game being a pretty middling Toki clone that was tuned up way too high, the second game is much, much more reasonable. Now being more like a run and gun with Co-Op to boot, Thunder Hoop 2 really does hit the ground running, with much better play control and more enjoyable levels than the first go around.
It does trade the weirdness for ramped up gore and lots of exploding bodies, because things get SERIOUS when a decade passes, don’t you know? Either way, the bosses are actually more fun to fight, the game is a lot more enjoyable to memorize, and without the checkpoint system the game as a whole is much more fair than the original Thunder Hoop, even if it still is an Arcade game that wants your money.
I wish the high score thresholds weren’t so crazy still, but this one is the highlight of the set hands down and worth a play with a friend. Add in the occasional genre shift into a horizontal shooter, some great music, and a much better game flow, and TH Strikes Back is a fun, underrated little gem I’m happy will have more eyes on it.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the Thunder Hoop Collection is pretty much the best treatment these two games could ask for, which isn’t that much. The first Thunder Hoop is a seriously flawed, poor man’s Toki no matter how hard you try to fix it, and the QOL from this collection makes it a lot more enjoyable since you can permanently keep a weapon that makes the enemies less spongy than before, and rewinding can help you avert the annoying deaths.
Thunder Hoop 2 is the highlight of the duology hands down, with full action all the time, much better level design, and a rockin soundtrack that all lead to the game being miles better than the original. Co-Op also does a good bit to make the game more enjoyable, even if the high score thresholds are too high to give score chasing any sort of sincere effort for extra replay value.
With only two games here, the big sell of the package is honestly just TH Strikes Back. For $10, that’s slightly more than an Arcade Archives release, and for two games I think I can barely recommend this set for TH2 alone, which is well worth playing through at least once. As for the first game, the cheats here are the closest you’ll ever get to making this experience an inch closer to being “fair”, and even still TH is just a lesser Toki at the end of the day.
I give Thunder Hoop Collection a 6 out of 10.