Nuke Them All | PC Review

I haven’t played a real-time strategy (RTS) game in a very long time, if ever. Civilization? Nope. Age of Empires? Negative. I’m fairly certain that the last game that I played that was remotely close to RTS was General Chaos for the Sega Genesis back in 1993. I’m fairly certain that I’ve missed out on these because I was not a big PC gamer where the RTS category enjoys the most success. The last two years have truly been the year of taking chances in game categories that I’ve avoided for most of my gaming life: Roguelikes (check), turn based RPG (check), and now RTS. Nuke Them All looked like a perfect combination of comical style and RTS content that I was thrilled to have been granted the ability to play and review. Come along and see if it’s a game that you’ll want to try out, too!

Story

The story is quite simple: win. You must guide your forces through the battlefield, capturing flags along the way. Each flag has some level of opponent base near it. Defeat the opponents, capture the flag, then move on using those forts and manufacturing plants as your own. Like most RTS games, Nuke Them All allows you to set attack plans on multiple areas at once, allowing the player to win a level faster. All the while, these enemy forces are trying to destroy your fort, as well. You must defend your fort, although at lower difficulty levels this was not much of a factor. 

You can upgrade your forts so that they will create items faster or with better abilities. You can instruct your robot forces to claim unoccupied vehicles to up your attack strength. You can repair robots and vehicles that have taken damage.

All the while, you are building up towards unlocking a nuke which can happen multiple times per level. On the harder difficulty settings, it is much more difficult to unlock the nuke. You don’t get them nearly as frequently as on the Cakewalk setting. The nuke is a fantastic weapon and can swiftly turn the tides of your level. 

Your performance in each level is graded with stars. One to three stars rate how well you did. Beating a level is all you need to move on to the next level. The star program is there in case you are a competitive gamer who wants to get the best grade in every level. There are also zombies and aliens.

The opening animated sequence would lead me to believe that there were sentient robots that I might care about. But, I don’t recall any other sequences. The rest of the game is pure gameplay (after the tutorial. More on that in the next section). Really, this is it. A simple story is vital and welcome here because…

So Much to Control

The tutorial video for Nuke Them All is six minutes long. There is gameplay showing you how it is done while a live-action video plays in the bottom right. There is a cute twenty-something girl with distractingly reflective sunglasses that shows you how to play it.

The basic controls are simple enough: How to move around the map, how to select one-to-many of your units around the map. Thankfully, they have a mind of their own once they have been placed. You don’t have to micromanage them. Instead, they will attack nearby enemies and capture the flag without explicit instructions.

But, there is so much. Different buildings that do different things, a multitude of weapons/vehicles/robots (seriously, I lost count) that also do different things. And the maps/levels are not small. I started playing the game with my laptop which has a 15 inch screen. It wasn’t enough. When I was zoomed in, I missed a lot of action going on off-screen. When I zoomed out, my squad was harder to see. I wanted more screen real estate. I doubt that Nuke Them All would play very well on a Steam Deck. You need a mouse and keyboard, anyhow.

Visuals/Music

I love the graphics. Each map is designed well to help with your strategy and planning. The cartoonish style is right up my alley and made me want to check out the next level to see what fun could be found. The robots move around as one would expect. The vehicles, on the other hand, stay pretty static as they move around the screen. 

The sound effects and music are a different story. The music is barely audible. That’s fine, because you want to hear the sound queues and warnings. The sound quality is top notch. Sadly, it’s also very repetitive. “Enemy is overwhelming us” or “Couldn’t ChatGPT do this?” was nice to hear the first couple of times. But, over and over again? The sound effects were also awesomely cartoonish. I felt like I was listening to an episode of GI Joe or Gobots. The rat-a-tat from the guns, the explosion sounds, the boings & bangs? All fantastic. 

Final Verdict

I am willing to bet that fans of RTS games will love Nuke Them All. I am highly recommending it for those gamers. Players who are not that experienced in RTS, like me, will appreciate the thorough explanation. Players who have done this before will welcome the fact that you can skip it.

Individually, the levels aren’t a slog. However, once I sat and played for an hour, I began to feel like they were. Nuke Them All is a game that I would likely play in 30 minute increments or one or two levels at a time. It’s a blast when played in that style. I’ll return to this game in the future just to have a good time, appreciate the sound effects, and the satisfaction of setting off the nuke and winning a level!

To hear me talk more about Nuke Them All, be sure to listen to the July 24, 2024 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast.

This review is based on a PC copy of Nuke Them All provided by Keymailer for coverage purposes. As of the time of this writing, it is exclusive to this platform.