Hello ladies, gentlemen and those of a non-binary nature. My name is Daibhi, this is the Gamerhub community, and for the first time in what feels like an age, I get to review a game that is right in my wheelhouse. Over the last few days, whilst co-ordinating between Galadrius The Mighty, Gavin, and others over the hub’s website and playing other games for review, I got thrown a bone. Pun completely intended. One thing readers of my reviews will know this that I absolutely adore is Roguelike games. Games where I fight monsters, get stuff, climb spires and the like. So, when I got Nuclear Throne on my list, I positively cheered. Seriously, I nearly cried. Anyway, enough about my life sat behind a console or a keyboard, time to crack on with the review.

Nuclear WHAT?!

Nuclear throne is a rogue-like RPG developed and published by Vlambeer and was released through Steam in 2013, for those who bought the early-access version. It released on LINUX, Windows, OS X, PS4 and PSVita in 2015, Nintendo Switch in 2019, and Xbox One in 2021. But, seeing as it’s a Sunday and we also recommend you follow one our favourite retrogamers, Zenbloke, we thought we’d do something different.

Plot

Here’s where everything gets very interesting. Most Roguelikes have really deep lore, based from or adapted from different countries’ mythologies. Nuclear throne, however, goes through a different route by revealing the world through the world, loading tips and the environment around you. This is brilliant in the sense that it has allowed everyone to keep guessing what caused the nuclear apocalypse that happened before the events of this game started.

So, as for the plot, here goes. This game is set a post-nuclear apocalypse world, where characters called mutants have gathered together to try to travel throughout the world to reach the “Nuclear Throne”. That’s it. There’s very little else to answer about the plot because the plot is simple by design. It doesn’t need anything more for the plot because it wants you to focus on the gameplay itself.

Gameplay

Let’s start with the two modes and an admission. As the fact is that I generally live alone, Twitter, I couldn’t do the local co-op mode, but I did get help online to do this. As a result, I can really only talk about the single player mode, but I wasn’t let down by that at all. So, when you boot up the game for the first time, you must go through a run of his game in your quest to find the Nuclear Throne. There are two characters that you can choose from, and you’ll unlock ten more as you play through the game. Each of these new characters will have unique abilities (not all of them good) which add different gaming experiences for new runs and improve the replay value for this game. As you run through the game repeatedly, the daily and weekly tasks that the publishers set through allow you to unlock new skins and secondary sprites for your characters which can add even more variation on certain levels. You eventually face a final boss on the Nuclear Throne where you can choose to carry on and start again with an increased difficulty until you die.

Once you’ve died, which I admit happened to me frequently during the time it took me to get this review completely, the game resets, except for the special weapons you unlock in hidden levels and crowns retained until you beat the final boss. The game also has a relatively simple levelling system where you gain experience in the form of rads dropped by enemies. Once sufficiently levelled up, you unlock a character-specific thing called “ultra-mutation”.

Visuals

Okay: This is where this might put some gamers might be put off. This game plays in a relatively cartoon fashion with an aspect ratio of 4:3 which helps give a nice retro feel and I certainly enjoyed it. The game looks cartoony and feels as it has been transported straight out of the early 2000s, but don’t let that put you off. The animations are cool, the sprites are funny, and I adore how this game plays on my gaming laptop and my Xbox Series X. I do have to wonder whether the 2D, top-down animation style will work for most people, but I really got into it.

Difficulty

Normally, I don’t put in this section in the review, but this needs saying. This game is really fucking difficult and I mean that sincerely. It starts off easy to break you in, but then this game does it’s best Dark Souls impression and gets very difficult very early on. A warning for Jirard Khalil and completionists like him- completing this game 100% is technically possible, but extremely frustrating, pointless and will make you fall out of love with gaming. Seriously, just don’t.

Price point

Nuclear Throne is available on all major games consoles commercially, and I haven’t got the patience, nor the passion for this game to go and give you the price from every major store. That being said, it’s £9.99 for both Xbox and PlayStation gamers and £11.99 for Nintendo Switch gamers.

Verdict

Nuclear Throne is exactly what you want from a good roguelike game, with dark humour, great animation, brilliant gameplay and a superb soundtrack. For the price, it’s a value-for-money gaming experience with 00’s game vibes. The lack of plot, even if by design is extremely disappointing, and the difficulty curve I can imagine will break a lot of controllers. The daily and weekly challenge modes as well as the game’s design keep this game endlessly replayable, but it requires a lot of patience to get good at this game. I thank god there’s a reddit community dedicated to this game because otherwise, this review would have been far more negative than this.

Joystick Rating- 3.8 Joysticks out of 5.

For the Gamerhub, I’ve been Daibhi, and you are all legends.