Silly Kennedy, with his negotiating…
So Kennedy screwed the pooch on the Cuban Missile Crisis. What might've happened? That's the overarching theme in Best Way and 1C's newest third-person RPG, Nuclear Union. Take one part "Wargames" and one part Fallout 3, and what do you get? A Soviet pilot that fought in the crazy days of big bombs being the protagonist and no clear storyline beyond "see what happens to this poor shlub" is the point here: explore the landscape, find supplies, and… well, not much else has been said about it yet.
But we do know that it's set in a post-apocalyptic 2012 Russia, starting out in the fragmented empire that's still held by the USSR but overrun with different gang factions. Setting off from the underground capital of Pobedograd is your Soviet pilot, off to do the one thing he's been able to do so far: survive.
Just what his end goal is hasn't been fully fleshed out yet, only that the Earth's surface is swimming in radiation that's destroyed everything in its path. And what it hasn't destroyed, it's mutated, like the rats and plants I was fighting off in the demo. There are pockets of civilization, towns that sell ammo and offer missions to undertake, but we just don't know why he's so special quite yet. (Or maybe he's not supposed to be.)
What is special, though, are the weapons. There's a focus here on creating and implementing Soviet weaponry that never actually made it to production. From a three-barrel Soviet submachine gun (nicknamed the "Soviet Uzi") and the TKB-022PM bullpen assault rife, mixed in with makeshift, single-shot pistols of varying quality, the gunplay should be tailored to a player's liking here. Again, not a lot was shown and actually playable, but the few that were show some realistic promise against the monsters created in the wasteland. What would a nuclear wasteland be without some mutated plants and animals to shoot? We'll have to wait for the range of baddies to be revealed, but hopefully they'll live up to how good the damaged landscape does.
There's still plenty of time to fix and wrap up the loose wiring of Nuclear Union (which is good, because the demo was more than a little shaky) before its tentative PC release schedule of 2014's first quarter. Hell, if it's ported to Mac as well, I might be losing a lot more sleep by then.
