Nuclear Throne (PC)
Post apocalyptic rogue-like top-down shooter, or more appropriately “five minute massacres”.
Bullet hells are not something I have experience with. The pure insanity of having gunfire raining down around me in such gratuitous amounts it becomes a shifting maze of hellfire and death that I’m expected to not only navigate but return fire throughout is a world foreign and scary to me.
Nuclear Throne does not ease me gently into this world. Sure, its early levels are inarguably easier than its later ones, but one wrong move and I’m still eating radioactive scorpion lasers.
The aesthetic charm of Nuclear Throne’s cover immediately struck me, and the extremely accessible price makes it a steal if you make it out with even a couple of hours gameplay. The premise is simple — humanity is long dead. The world lies in ruins. All that’s left is radioactive wastes of varying themes and the multitude of mutant abominations vying for the Nuclear Throne therein.
Simple enough, right? The soundtrack has just the sort of Newgrounds charm (you’ll know what I mean if you liked the Castle Crashers soundtrack) that resonates perfectly with these bite-sized games of cartoonish mass-carnage. Special shout-out to the track ‘Y V Mansion’ which has gotten me killed at least a few times with its bombastic badassitude.
Starting out fairly basic, Nuclear Throne offers characters a growing roster of mutant creatures to challenge the wasteland with, each coming with their own pros and cons, a unique ability each covering basic dodge-rolls to turning into an invincible shard of crystal for a short span of time. Slaughtering your way through a level causes enemies to drop chunks of radioactive goop, which upon collection fills an experience meter. Capping it by the end of a level awards the player with a choice from a random collection of upgrades. Death resets you to zero, back to the start of the game without any of these abilities unlocked, so experimentation is encouraged for players to find their preferred style of play. Most of these tricks are fairly basic, and some simply go without saying — increased health pickups should only be ignored on challenge runs for example — but the randomised nature also means you’ll sometimes find yourself improvising where you’d otherwise be relying on a crutch ability.
The breakneck speed of the gameplay is exhilarating to say the least. Keeping up with everything is often tricky, and I’ve cursed more times than not as stray bullets clip me and eat precious health points I should be saving for the brutality of later levels, and the almost completely randomised nature of each area forces players to adapt when their favourite weapon drops don’t show up. Wanted that shotgun? Tough, learn to use the crossbow effectively. Holding out for a wicked machine gun? Here’s a grenade launcher, try not to blow yourself up.
What Nuclear Throne accomplishes so well with its full package though is bite-size chunks of bombastic fun. A single playthrough will last at most twenty minutes, with death usually cutting it down to more of a five minute affair. It’s easy to get frustrated after a string of deaths, but the value here is that it’s also incredibly easy to pick the game up and play it for ten minutes in between other things. Frequently I’d start it up and play it for twenty minutes, long enough to die two or three times (or more if I was having a bad night) and then shut it down again before logging off my PC entirely. It feels good to tear through a short game at this kind of rate compared to bigger games where the gaming culture has shifted to desire pure hours of playtime regardless of actual enjoyment had therein.
I’ve been saying things like ‘breakneck speed’ and ‘tearing through’ a lot here though, so let me just go back and add a little more perspective to things — I’ve never actually beaten Nuclear Throne. I’ve reached what I can only assume is the final boss a grand total of once, and it slaughtered me so hysterically fast I didn’t even have it in me to be mad about it. Now I said at the top of this that I’m a foreigner to the world of bullet hell, so that probably accounts for most of my spectacular lack of success, but beyond that I think this still stands: this game is hard. It’s rough at the beginning, a careless mistake will see you wrecked at the first boss, but by the end every single victory will be snatched from the jaws of defeat, and you will be crawling your way to victory.
There’s a great feeling of exhilaration in that, but players who don’t like repeating content or frequent death will probably find themselves getting frustrated before long, and the game’s randomly generated levels and enemy placements can sometimes make for an absolutely spectacular moment where the RNG gods flip you the bird with both hands and bring the best run you’ve had all night to a screeching halt.
But alas, tomorrow’s another day, and maybe if you squeeze in a quick massacre before work you’ll feel better about yourself.
Currently sitting on the steam store for $12 USD, Nuclear Throne’s a good deal for that much, but I had it for less than half that courtesy of one of Steam’s many sales, and really any price from its starting to lower is a solid investment.
Work on that ass, it’s got a throne to sit in.
