This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.
How did I do?
| Category | Completion level |
|---|---|
| Times completed | 1 |
| Character Used | Crystal |
| Runs attempted | 202 |
I like to think that I am pretty good at video games. By no means do I have what it takes to be an E-sports athlete, or do I have the patience or ability to be a top tier speed-runner, but I feel like I can play any game, in any genre, on regular difficulty and beat it. Back in my achievement hunting days, I was “forced” to play a lot of games on expert or whatever the hardest setting was in order to finish out a game. So far (knock on wood) I have never had to abandon a game based on its difficulty and nothing on the list previously has gotten me nearly as close as the game we are going to discuss today.
Today’s discussion is about a game called “Nuclear Throne,” a 2015 game by Vlambeer that has an incredible 96% positive review score on Steam. It is a roguelike, semi-bullet hell, twin-stick shooter game where you take the control of a select mutant and fight your way through multiple levels to become ruler of the wasteland. Like most roguelikes, everything is fairly randomized to make each run unique. While the levels will be in the same order, the level layouts themselves will be procedurally generated. How big is the map, how many enemies, how many chests, what weapons drop, etc. is all randomized and nearly every run will have a different combination of the before mentioned fields. As you progress through the areas you will level up by collecting radiation which can then be used to select 1 of 4 random abilities that appear at the end of the stage.
At the start of the game you pick from a handful of mutants who all have their own special ability or benefit that comes with picking them over a different mutant. There is a plant that allows you to throw a snare out that will slow down your enemies, or a fish monster that has a dive roll as its special ability. Your goal, is to kill every enemy in each level, which will open up a portal to the next level. You can hold two weapons at any time and alternate between them as you see fit, or drop them for other weapons you find along the way. You have 5 different ammo types, and each weapon will fall into one of those 5 (or a 6th, melee) category. You need to balance out, not only what weapon you work best with, but also what weapon do you have ammo for. Every few levels you fight a boss which is obviously a supped up enemy of the area. For instance the first boss is in 1-3 and is a stronger version of the bandit that you have come across previously. He fires a machine gun instead of a pistol, has more HP, and can charge to break through walls you might be using as cover. Make it to the end of the game and you can kill the Nuclear Throne and be the ruler of the wasteland.
It is all what you would expect from a roguelike game of this caliber. Some new characters are unlocked by completing certain objectives during a run, another character is unlocked by beating the game. There are hidden areas and hidden characters that require more precise things to happen that you will either have to get incredibly lucky to trigger, or find by looking it up on the internet. However, unlike similar roguelikes that I have played, nothing carries over from run to run. The only thing you gain by failing is potentially knowledge about what to do or not do in your previous run. While that knowledge might be helpful on your first few trips into new areas, eventually that commodity runs out and you are left with nothing gained for your time through this game. There is no save at any point during the game, and your weapons, ammo, upgrades, map layout, nothing will carry over to your next run. This will be our first real topic for this game.
As I said at the top of the article, I think of myself as a good gamer, but it took me 202 runs in this game before I beat it for the first time. I don’t know if that is normal, but it certainly seems like a lot of deaths before things finally broke in my favor. Those 202 runs were also roughly 18 hours of gametime, and this is making me sound even weaker in hindsight, but I played a game where a winning run can be sub 30 minutes, and for 18 hours I only beat it once. There is no difficulty setting for this game, trust me I would have found it after run 100, so you just have to keep persisting if you truly want to beat it. Now I know there are people who beat it on their 5th-10th try through the game, because this is the internet, I am sure someone has left a comment saying they beat it on their 1st or 2nd run through of the game, and I believe it. The difference between my 200th run and my 202nd run is the randomizer working in my favor, and that sounds a lot like luck, but I can’t think of another way to put it.
After so many runs I knew what my strengths were and what helped me get the farthest in the game. I knew that my ideal weapons was either the shovel or wrench, and a bazooka or cluster launcher. These two weapons would allow me to not really worry about ammo and I could tackle a lot of what the game throws at you. However, in addition to those weapons I would need certain abilities. For instance having a melee weapon, means you need the “long reach” upgrade and if you can pair that with the “bloodlust” upgrade (sometimes gain 1 hp from kills), means that you can potentially kill enemies through walls (your swing can go through walls) and get health from them. In a game where health and ammo drops can be quite rare, you need an ability that can hopefully recover some health when you lose it. In this game, at most, you can take 3 hits from enemies and later in the game some enemies will do enough damage to kill you in a single hit. My win came when I played as the crystal character that starts with a max HP of 10, and usually a single bullet in the first level might do 2 to 3 hp. In later levels, a hit might be 6 HP or more. Circling back to what made this run successful, was that I got the weapons I liked and could use, I got the upgrades that benefitted me, and on top of that I was blessed with the random level god to not put me in position where I was going to be screwed.
Sometimes 1 or 3 of those random elements will not be in your favor. I have had games where I got the right weapons, but never the right upgrade, making my melee attack dangerously short ranged and my ability to regain HP off the table. Sometimes you get lucky with 2 things, but get dropped into a level where there is no geometry to use as cover and you have 20 enemies all shooting you in a circle. I can’t possibly explain how frustrating it is that the level geometry is a narrow corridor that you can’t see far enough ahead, only to have a kamikaze enemy come flying in from offscreen killing you instantly before you react. In order for me to win, I needed everything to line up in my favor and it finally did. Now don’t get me wrong, not all previous 201 attempts were because the randomizer wasn’t in my favor, a good portion ~130-150 deaths, were certainly my own doing. Maybe I was rushing too much or not enough, forgetting to use my secondary ability, blowing myself up with a grenade or explosion because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was shooting. Hell some of my deaths can be attributed to me setting the character select screen on random and trying to play as the bloated corpse who starts with 2 HP and is essentially playing on hard mode. If I would have always played as the crystal maybe I could have beat the game in 150 tries.
To the game’s credit, I rarely felt cheated with my deaths. It wasn’t a perfect system as, sometimes I would be cheated by the randomizer, but after a lot of my deaths I could usually think, “If only I would have done X I could have survived.” While this game can be played in slow motion, trust me that’s how I play, this is primarily meant to be played by constantly running and shooting to take out enemies. If you want to watch any high level of play, it seems like the player playing never lets off the shoot button. I am certainly not that good of a player, and I would slink behind cover like this was The Order any chance I got. Endlessly creeping so that I could take enemies out with very minimal risk to myself. Of course, just because I rarely felt cheated doesn’t mean that I also wouldn’t get frustrated trying to beat this game. I mentioned at the top that I have never given up on a game, but the thought occurred on multiple occasions while playing Nuclear throne.
One of the biggest hills I struggled to climb was the boss of the third area. The snow boss, is a tiny little guy who drops from the sky and has a gun that allows bullets to ricochet off walls for a little bit. Before I started exclusively playing as the crystal, who has a temporary shield ability, I really had no strategy for him. He appears early on in the level, where you probably haven’t dealt with a lot of the other enemies around, so if you try to stand pat in an alcove, he will drop from above and unleash a volley into your hiding spot. If you decide to run into a wider area to deal with him, well you might find yourself wandering into a larger enemy supply where you will be dealing with multiple other enemies that can all kill you quickly. While he is alive, he also summons the police enemies to keep re-appearing so that you are not battling him alone, and should you still kill him, he bounces around and then blows up, potentially killing you with his dying breath. Were I to fire up the game again, I can say that he is still the main breaking point of a run. There are still several levels after him, including one heavy kamikaze level, but I don’t consider any run of mine officially started until he is dealt with. No joke in probably the last 50 runs I had, I probably only beat him on 10 of them, and of those 10 only got to the final boss 3 total times.
Perhaps this whole article is just to show how much I stink at this game, because upon completion of the game and checking the stats so I knew what I finished with, I noticed a category for largest win streak.. I chuckled to myself, because I spent 200 runs to get 1 win, I can’t imagine turning that right over and somehow getting a win streak of 2 or even 3. Perhaps I just need to git gud.. One thing I was disappointed to see, and something I only learned about after I beat the game, was just how much of this game is hidden from what I would consider the normal run. There are a bunch of hidden areas, characters, even a special chest where you can put an item so, should you find the chest again, you can have it for another run. However, to unlock most of these things you would need to have a guide open for you, because they are out of the ordinary.
This is perhaps my “old man yells at cloud” moment, but I dislike when games expect you to play with a guide, or to study a game online to get the most out of it. Now, don’t get me wrong, if this was to unlock a golden gun, or some cosmetics, you can keep that stuff hidden where only your diehard fans find it. However, after finishing the game, I was wondering how to unlock other characters, or to visit levels that I missed, to unlock new “heads” or cosmetics, and the answer to almost all that stuff is to look it up. For one area you need to get a screwdriver as a weapon (not something you would normally ever take, given it’s weak and short ranged) in one of the earlier stages (like 1.1-1.3) then use that screwdriver on a very specific car in 2.1 and then you get whisked away to a new level. Or how about taking a specific mutation (level-up power, that shows up randomly) finding a frozen flower in 5.1, and then sacrificing 4 HP (1 HP x 4) to open up a portal to access a new level and get a new character? I’m nitpicking here, and I understand that a majority of people probably are looking up the game they play constantly, but I still think it’s a bad system. Can you beat the game without these bonuses? Yes, obviously, but I come from a time when unlocks might be hinted at in game, and not something you just luckily do. This game doesn’t have the equivalent of it, but in RPGs you might get hinted towards a treasure based on an NPC, in shooters maybe there would be some graffiti on a wall, for Nuclear Throne, the answer is just skip to the internet.
Even with all my failings, Nuclear Throne is strangely addictive. This won’t apply to everyone, because I certainly know people who will be offput by the difficulty, but the runs can be short enough and you can convince yourself that the next run the randomizer might be kind to you which makes it easier to give it another go. Its also cooperative, but I was not able to test it out as this game is too difficult to either have my wife or kids try, but consider that a feather in its cap. While part of this series is finishing up games on my backlog and constantly moving forward, so I don’t just play the same 10 games over and over again, and despite the fact that I angrily told myself and wife after a grueling defeat in this game that, “Once I’m done, I am deleting this game forever,” I left the game installed, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I might still boot it up from time to time. Never to the point that I become good at the game, heavens no, but maybe just maybe I can beat it with one more character outside of another 200 runs.
Is this the greatest game of all time?: No
Where does it rank: It's a weird Stockholm Syndrome where despite failing over and over again, and being frustrated by the randomness of drops, and level geometry, the game still comes out of this review fairly favorable. I am by no means someone who is going to plug 100s of hours into this game, or even bother unlocking much more in the game, but on occasion I can see myself still firing this up and playing a run or two. It's difficulty is certainly a sticking point and you will either bounce off or power through and I won't blame anyone for bouncing off. I have this ranked as the 59th Greatest Game off All Time.It sits between Psychonauts (60th) and Golf Club Wasteland (58th)
Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.
Thanks for listening
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