I love Operation Thunderstorm.
This game did something that almost no other game does. It kept me playing for an entire day.
No alt-tabbing. No checking my phone. Just me, glued to the screen. And I actually beat it. Which is saying something, because I own thousands of games and rarely finish any of them. But this one? I couldn’t stop.
Not because it’s polished. Not because it’s some hidden masterpiece. But because it’s the most bizarrely satisfying budget WWII shooter I’ve ever played.
And I mean budget. This game came out in 2008, right when WWII shooters were collapsing under their own weight. Everyone assumed it was just another Call of Duty clone. But Operation Thunderstorm isn’t that.
What it actually is… is Polish Wolfenstein.
Made by City Interactive—now CI Games—a company that was known, back then, for shoveling out low-cost shooters by the dozen. In fact, this game was released during a very specific and weird moment in their history.
In 2007, City Interactive went public on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. And in 2008—the same year this game came out—they announced they were done with “budget-range operations.” They were rebranding. Shifting away from quantity toward quality. Operation Thunderstorm was the last gasp of their old model.
So what you’re playing here isn’t just a weird shooter. It’s a fossil. A transitional relic. The final entry in a dying era before City Interactive pivoted to big-boy games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior and Lords of the Fallen.
And you can feel it.
The game was developed with a team of 111 people. It used LithTech Jupiter EX—the same engine as F.E.A.R. Which is hilariously overpowered for what they made. But it gives the whole thing a crunchy, snappy, almost haunted-house quality that’s impossible to fake.
You play as British MI6 agent Jan Mortyr—practically the Polish B.J. Blazcowicz. He stars in quite a few FPS games—he was an established brand in Poland. Over there, this was Mortyr 4: Operation Thunderstorm.
But since nobody outside Poland had any clue what Mortyr was, we just got stuck with the most generic name in video game history. Operation Thunderstorm.
Which has a similar name to a Capcom arcade shmup, a Wii helicopter shooter, several real-world military operations, and at least one anti-logging initiative. Good luck Googling it.
Anyway, let’s talk about the actual game.
You’re sent behind enemy lines in 1942 to assassinate Goebbels, Göring, and Himmler. Yes, really, that’s the plot.
You just straight-up kill Nazi high command. No moral gray area. No pretense of realism. No problem. Never mind that these people died years later in real life. Operation Thunderstorm doesn’t care. It’s historical fan fiction. And it’s amazing.
Unless you’re playing the German version, where all the names are removed, the swastikas are replaced with “evil symbols,” and the blood is turned off permanently. The German version literally censors its own premise. It becomes a weird mission about killing… unnamed bureaucrats. It’s surreal.
But the actual gameplay? Surprisingly fun.
It’s a corridor shooter. Pure and simple. You walk forward. You shoot Nazis. You move to the next room. You peek around corners. You lean left and right. It’s Wolfenstein with some extra jank. But there’s one mechanic that makes it stand out: blind fire.
You crouch behind cover, and instead of popping up, you can raise your arm just high enough to fire over a box—guided by a little arrow icon. It’s crude. It’s clunky. But it works. And it gives the game a weird, accidental layer of tactics.
Then there’s the Karabiner 98k.
This rifle is absurd. You can shoot a guy in the leg and he dies instantly. Arm shots? Instant ragdoll. It’s one of the most overpowered rifles I’ve ever used in a game. And I love it. Because the ragdoll physics are completely unhinged.
Shoot a Nazi and watch him cartwheel off a balcony. Toss a grenade and send three enemies bouncing like crash test dummies. The game is full of “odd death positions” and physics bugs so wild they start to feel intentional.
And that’s the point. The game’s flaws are what make it good.
You get a broken knife that does nothing. You get a dumb mini-map that’s never needed. You get canned voice lines delivered with the emotional range of a voicemail. And yet—somehow—all of it clicks.
I mean, this game has a “see your own foot” feature. You look down, and there’s your left leg. Why? No reason. It’s just there. One foot. Floating. Always watching.
The campaign’s short. Maybe four hours if you take your time. Maybe two and a half if you sprint through.
And yet, I played it twice. Once on Steam Deck. Once on my TV with a Steam Controller. And shockingly? It’s incredible with a controller.
The gyro aiming on Deck is perfect. You line up shots from across the room and drop enemies before they even react. It was never designed for this kind of control scheme, but it accidentally became one of the best Steam Deck shooters I’ve played.
There’s multiplayer, technically. Deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag. All recycled single-player maps. No one plays it. No one should. It’s clearly a checkbox feature—something slapped on to tick off “multiplayer” on the back of the box.
Now, at launch? Critics hated this game. We’re talking 40–50% scores. Called it cramped. Monotonous. Ugly. Said it looked like a shooter from the ‘90s. Said the AI was dumb. Said the levels were boring.
But the critics were definitely wrong.
Because by 2025, Operation Thunderstorm has clawed its way back. It now holds a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam. Over 300 reviews. 77% positive. It’s become a cult hit.
People buy it for a dollar during sales and walk away surprised. Not because it’s refined—but because it’s fun.
And not in the way the developers intended.
It’s fun because it’s broken. Because the physics are hilarious. Because the design is dumb in just the right way.
This isn’t “so bad it’s good.” It’s “so weird it’s great.”
A weird little game from a weird little moment in Eastern European game development history. A snapshot of a studio about to evolve. A broken, budget shooter that overshot its limits and became something memorable by accident.
Not many games can say that.
So yeah, I love Operation Thunderstorm. Not despite the mess. Because of it.
