Nuclear Option is a flight sim. And it’s awesome.
Did you know… there are three kinds of flight sims? Those that are very forgiving and arcade. Those that require you to spend weeks just to learn the controls. And there is Nuclear Option. Those are the three. If you haven’t realized, that was a reference to Pixy.
So yeah! While Ace Combat is an arcade game that is more of an anime than a flight sim1, or something like War Thunder is a time sink or pay to win, and DCS probably requires you to own a desk-sized controller, at the same time NO offers you easy to get in mechanics while preserving space for learning. I’ve spent only 25 hours on this game, but I assure you, I know what I am talking about!
So what does make the game so nice?
If you’ve had the misfortune to play War Thunder mentioned earlier, you’ll recognize some of the key binds. If not, you won’t suffer, because the tutorial is pretty nice, and there’s a free flight mode to get used to the layout.
But I have to say that I think the default binding of selecting a target is weird. I set it to ‘C’ and one of the side buttons on my mouse and delete a target to the other side button. I like it more.
The game also has a joystick emulation. That means that instead of constantly moving your mouse in a direction, you can set the angle and intensity once and the aircraft will follow it indefinitely. Although I set the centering force pretty high so it quickly cancels out.
And that is pretty much all! Other keybinds are quite intuitive and the essential controls are explained in the tutorial. Let’s play the game at last!
So, you chose an aircraft, spawn in, and… No, you don’t spawn on the runway like in WT, you spawn in an actual hangar that can be destroyed and then repaired, and taxi to the runway! ‘I’ stands for “immersion”.
You successfully taxi to the runway without accidentally losing your chassis, and take off. Now it’s time to do some ace combat. Or not ace but rookie combat, if you’re new here. To put it oversimplified, the combat is as follows:
Sometimes it’s this simple, but sometimes it’s not, because the enemy doesn’t stand still - enemy radars constantly scan the skies for the air defenses to clear it of you, and the enemy pilots evade and pop counter measures just like you do.
Almost forgot, yeah, you personally can nuke the other faction like Crimson 1 did Cascadia. It’s only the matter of how you handle the air defenses that will very likely intercept the payload if left alone. Or of how close to the ground you’re willing to be when you separate.
If you’re lucky and you don’t die to an enemy ace, air defenses, or terrain, and successfully released your payload, that’s time to RTB and land. It also requires practice, but soon you’ll land “good enough” for the game to give you the sortie bonus (which is really nice!). The game thinks that landing with broken chassis, no wings and an engine on fire is exactly “good enough”.
For me, I usually start actively breaking at ~3-5km2 away from the air base, that so when I’m 1.5-2km away my speed is ~300-400km/h.
There are plenty. You have free flight mentioned above, where it’s almost peaceful (the ships will fuck with you anyway), you have standalone missions where you have one objective and one sortie to complete it; there are more sandbox-like modes like Altercation, Confrontation, and Escalation, each is bigger than the previous but all allow you to complete the objective any way you want and can afford.
You can also play either single- or multiplayer, either PvP or co-op. I personally have been playing co-op lately, and it’s quite nice.
The game got updated just this week as I’m writing this, and I love VT-7 Vagrant.
It’s affordable, it’s fast, it’s agile, it’s deadly. I love it.
Hell yeah.
It’s an early access game made by an australian indie studio, and it’s already more fun than half of the modern AAA, and especially more fun than War Thunder.