Nuclear Blaze review: Rated F for Fun

Nuclear Blaze is one of the most interesting indie games we have tried in a while. While playing a multi-budget blockbuster that looks pretty and plays good sounds like a fun thing, sometimes a small, more contained experience exceeds one’s expectations pretty well.

Deepnight’s Nuclear Blaze did exactly that.

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Made by the person who created the critically acclaimed roguelike “Dead Cells”, Nuclear Blaze is a story of saving kittens and taking care of fires. There are more positives in this game than negatives, and with the accessibility options available for players to tweak and try, it certainly lives up to the concept of “Rated E for Everyone”.

One firefighter is out to save burning buildings and kittens in Nuclear Blaze

The story in Nuclear Blaze is pretty straightforward and simple. Trust me, this game doesn’t even require a story, but Sébastien "deepnight" Benard made sure there is still a story for players to follow through.

The story follows a firefighter air-dropped right in the middle of a burning compound to rescue survivors and extinguish the spreading fire. While doing the job, the firefighter stumbles upon a military compound, and its presence might become a hindrance for the players to do their job efficiently.

There is no voice acting of any sort in Nuclear Blaze and most of the story is told through text. Regardless, the inclusion of a story, even if not necessary, is a nice way to keep players hooked to the game. Story bits explaining the reason for such an accident can be found and read throughout the game.

A hose and guts to save the day

Nuclear Blaze is a 2D side-scroller platform puzzler. The gameplay is pretty simple. Players scroll through the levels, exploring and revealing the immediate map as they keep moving.

Since every map is on fire, the objective of the player is to take the fire out and move on to the next area. Dying will reset the visible areas, so players have to maneuver through the map again, taking out the fire.

The movement feels incredibly smooth and precise on both keyboard and controllers, so it's a pleasure to walk through each level.

To remove the fire, players are equipped with a fire hose with their own water tank which they can use to take the fire out of the area. Point the hose out using the directional button while pressing the water button to spray water.

The water in the tank gradually finishes if players keep spraying it. Each level in Nuclear Blaze has a water refuel station that automatically refills the tank. Water conservation, just like real life, is important in this game and will put players in tight spots if emptied out.

Players can also dodge through flames, electricity and reach far-off places using the dodge function. It is handy, feels responsive and floaty, and gets the job done pretty well.

The gameplay option in Nuclear Blaze is pretty simple and does not overwhelm players with too many elements. For a little extra challenge, players can go through secret spots in an area using their movement skills and save kittens.

Who doesn’t like saving kittens?

Accessible and fun for people of every age

Nuclear Blaze leaves the level of difficulty to the player. Even though the game does not have the usual conventional difficulty selector, players can go to the game settings and tweak the difficulty based on the section of the game they do not want to deal with.

Accessibility options are always welcome, with games like Celeste and The Last of Us 2 having a myriad of choices for the ease of players. Accessibility features in Nuclear Blaze ensure that players can reel back and have mindless fun with it if they want, or make their game insanely difficult for an extra challenge.

Furthermore, Nuclear Blaze features a mode called Kid Mode. It is made for children who want to try the game out without having to deal with the more complex functions of the game, like pointing a hose or jumping

Kids can play through four carefully crafted levels where they go to save the kittens. There is no death in this mode, so kids can have fun saving the world and the kittens.

This mode was originally made by Sébastien for his 3-year-old kid but was put in the final game for everyone to try and have fun with. The Kid mode, however, needs a lot more love down the line as the current amount of levels in the mode is a bit too less.

In terms of controls, the game can be played with either a keyboard or a controller. There is no mouse support, though the current control options work really well. However, the controller keybind cannot be remapped, which is not much of an issue since the default control scheme for the controller is well thought out.

Performance

Nuclear Blaze can and will run on any modern system out there, even on a basic work laptop. The game was tried on two different systems, the main 1050ti system with 1080p resolution and the work laptop housing an Intel dual-core processor and onboard graphics.

Both systems handled the game effortlessly without any frame dip. Beautiful Pixel art graphics help the game a lot in achieving the smooth performance.

In Conclusion

Nuclear Blaze is brilliant. What started as a 48-hour game-jam project for Ludum Dare turned into quite possibly a great indie game with a lot of accessibility options and something for people of every age to play and enjoy. This game will benefit a lot in the years to come with workshop support on Steam.

As of now, this is a big recommendation and quite possibly one of the indie games worth checking out this year. We hope the team keeps on working on it since they have made a solid game with a lot of care and love.