Whenever I launch Steam, my eyes instantly go to the “New Releases” on the front page of the Steam Store. I see games I wish I had time to play, and games I have absolutely no interest in playing. Some of those games manage to fall somewhere between the two, in the crack of “would play if given the opportunity.”
Nuclear Dawn is one such game. When I was given the opportunity to play the game—as a review (full disclosure: I was provided the game as a review copy)—I instantly jumped on it. Well, to say I did it at an instant would be a gross exaggeration. Needless to say, I installed it when I had the chance to do so and I was happily surprised to see that it ran on the OSX. That meant not having to reboot to Windows 7 or interrupt my browsing on reddit and elsewhere. It is a plus in the game’s favor.
Before launching it however, I noticed the game’s price. At $24.99, it’s a fairly steep sum to pay for a multiplayer game with no single player campaign. It’s also an indie-ish title, so the price point just struck me as odd. It would no doubt dissuade anyone from wanting to pick up and play the game on a whim. It’s understandable that the developers wish to recoup the cost of the game’s development, but being a loss leader would help more than it would hurt.
Truth be told, I don’t care all that much about how much a game costs, but readers ask me to take these things into consideration—so I do.
Anyway, I ventured into the game to see if it was truly worth the price tag.
The first thing I noticed was that Nuclear Dawn is a multiplayer-only game (no shit, it even states that in the description) so the first thing I did was attempt to familiarize myself with the game’s rules with the help of the built-in tutorials. Unlike most new games, which teach you about the game on-the-fly, Nuclear Dawn (like another recent game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution) is a throwback with its video-based tutorials. I watched one and decided instead that it’d be better to experience the game first hand, so I hit the server browser, which functions identically to the ones in Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike Source. As Nuclear Dawn is built on the Source Engine, that is to be expected.
As soon as I jumped into the fray, I was given the choice of four different character classes, which are almost identical to the ones in Battlefield 3, with the exception of a ninja-like class called the Stealth. There’s the Exo, the heavy weapons guy; Assault, who’s a shock trooper, sniper, and Stealth-hunter all in one; Stealth, who can cloak and use fist blades to take down dudes at close range; and Support, who can fix buildings and heal other players.
With up to 16 players on each side, the point of the game is to take control of the map as the RTS Commander builds defenses and the rest of you establish a perimeter and take out the enemy. A bit like Natural Selection, the commander plays the game in a top-down RTS view, giving orders to players, constructing buildings and researching weapons kits with resources located on the map.
The game is all good in theory, but with most players being relatively new to the game—myself included—the commander I had on my side had no idea what he was doing, and even if he did, no one showed any interest in following his orders. Without that kind of cohesion, it’s hard to get a proper game going. The experience is a bit like trying to herd cats.
I could talk about the game’s achievement system, unlocks, and skill upgrades, which increase—like Battlefield 3—with the amount of time you spend on a certain class playing the game. But to talk about these features is to talk about the icing on a cake that exploded while in the oven and made a complete mess of the kitchen. It’s as if the developers set the cake to bake at precisely the right temperature and the players came along and turned the dial up a few dozen notches.
When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about “hell [being] other people,” I’m almost certain he wasn’t referring to the inanity I encountered while on the servers, but he might as well have been. Nuclear Dawn is the kind of game that’s either made or broken by its community—and it’s still too early to predict how things will go for the game, especially without a dedicated fanbase behind it at the moment, but I’m willing to give Nuclear Dawn a chance.
There are solid FPS and RTS mechanics behind the game, but it’s one that needs an equally solid group of players to enable it to flourish.
