The reference to Bungie’s classic, where the choice carried similar implications for one’s overall strategy, is even made explicit as two of Nuclear Throne’s weapons look like exact 8-bit replicas of Halo’s Beam Rifle and the legendary Gravity Hammer.Ĭombat feels fantastic, at least as long as one sticks to the mouse and keyboard – twin stick controllers are ill-suited to a game where conserving ammo through precision aiming is a priority. Being restricted to just two means that you never have access to every tactical option available and a dearth of ammunition ensures that, even when you’ve found the combination that feels right for your own particular playing style, you may still be forced to change your loadout and adapt accordingly. Explosives can clear out whole sections, including your own character if used recklessly, while shovels and sledgehammers will never run out of ammo. Shotguns are excellent for short-range crowd control but ineffective for longer distances. Precision-based crossbows can deal devastating amounts of damage to single, powerful enemies but are useless against numbers. There are several categories, each suited to specific situations. Recalling Halo is a less constant but equally painful decision: which weapons to keep and which to leave behind. Sniping from a distance to clear an area stops being an option for players wishing to survive beyond that and every second spent in-game becomes an agonizing choice between risking it all into the fray and holding back until it’s just a little bit safer. The need for constant movement to collect rads brilliantly eliminates the possibility of passive, overdefensive approaches. They’re the game’s equivalent of experience points, the only way to ensure the crucial upgrades that go with leveling up – neglect them and you’ll be seriously underpowered in the harder stages. These chunks of green radioactive mass, dropped by fallen enemies and bottled inside mud-caked containers, however, are no simple score multipliers. Like the geoms of Geometry Wars, Nuclear Throne’s rads can only be absorbed when approached and will rapidly fade into nothingness if they’re not. Its core mechanics, however, owe an even greater debt to a pair of rather unexpected sources. Further variety is provided by an assortment of weapon types (running the technological gamut from wrenches to laser cannons) and level upgrades, or mutations, including such inspired choices as Hammerhead, which allows you to push inside walls either to create a temporary safe space from the bullet-hell outside, or to tunnel your way to an inaccessible enemy from an unexpected direction. Fish, for example, can accommodate riskier players by quickly rolling out of harm’s way, while Plant’s power of entangling enemies suggests a more cautious, calculated type of play. There is a range of characters to wander its post-apocalyptic world with, each favoring a specific approach to its numerous hazards.
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Like Ed McMillen’s masterpiece, it features a series of short, claustrophobically confined levels packed with throngs of enemies whose patterns one must learn by heart so that their attacks will be anticipated rather than merely reacted to.
As the population of each dwindles, their corpses dotting the otherwise surprisingly tidy Wasteland, an illusion of omnipotence is proportionately reinforced – what’s a lone sniper and a handful of rats to a level 6 Crystal with a triple machine gun and a grenade launcher? This insidiously decelerating natural rhythm, an inversion of the classic video game convention that dictates levels should be getting progressively harder, tends to engender a false sense of security that will be responsible for more player deaths than any of its bosses.Ī top-down roguelike of excruciating difficulty with a visual aesthetic that oscillates between cuteness and morbidity, Nuclear Throne at first brings The Binding of Isaac to mind. Here’s an indispensable piece of advice for the Nuclear Throne neophyte: never relax between stages.
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