Looks like Fallout, smells like stalker, but then tastes very different. The new action game nuclear case has pleasantly surprised MeinMo editor Benedict Grothaus and despite the rather short season, ensured that he is (once again) overslept.
If a game grabs me, I don’t like to put it aside – especially when it is evident that I will soon be through with it. It is no secret that I like to sacrifice sleep for this, even at Remnant 2 I almost missed the work at the time.
Now the British indie studio Rebellion has invited us to test nuclear cases before release. I already played the game at Gamescom 2024, now I was allowed to play the full release version.
As a die-hard Fallout fan, an atomic post-apocalypse in northern England sounds pretty much like the game that I really want to play. I didn’t expect that nuclear cases in the end.
Nuclear case is not the Fallout 5 that everyone is waiting for – and yet it has completely tied me up for almost a week.
Gameplay trailer for nuclear case shows you how you can survive in idyllic England
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Locked up with angry Scots and aggressive hippies
About the premise: Nuclear case in northern England in the 1960s. The real almost super-gau serves as a hanger for the Windscale nuclear power plant. Here nuclear case plays, but explores alternative and somewhat crazy events.
First of all, it sounds like Fallout. And in fact there are some parallels: strange “mutations” (which are actually not), different political groups and the human attempt to somehow find structure after a war. Even a strange sect that hides the consequences of the catastrophe hides in the forests.
However, nuclear cases block you into a quarantine area, similar to the ancient role-playing game Gothic-and you somehow have to escape. Already in the first few minutes the action game shows what it takes off from the obvious relationship in the Ödland:
Nuclear case dispenses with stupid humor and exaggerated representations, but remains down -to -earth – more like stalkers. There is still one or the other nonsense, such as the skeleton of Mr. Bean with his wing chair on his mini. The differences are significantly larger.
Somehow Teddy is missing.
Which judge forgot his helmet here?
Apparently we are in Great Britain.
One of the most important works by HG Wells.
It doesn’t work completely without a paired stuff.
Nuclear case does everything differently than related role -playing games
You may have noticed that I don’t nuclear nuclear case as a RPG title and there is a good reason. There is no character creation and even leveling works differently. More precisely: it doesn’t work at all.
Instead of climbing stages, you will find skill points in the world and can then choose a total of 36 skills that you still have to discover. There are also no quests. NPCs give you tasks and tell you where you could find something roughly, but you always have to come up with where you have something to do.
The “hints” help you solve puzzles and replace the quest log. Instead, the focus is on the discovery. If a place looks interesting, it is usually too and it is worth sniffing around here.
A nice mechanics here is the treasure hunt. As soon as you have a metal detector, he beeps from time to time and notice that something is buried nearby. Although this is only a small mini game, this ensures short moments of happiness and loosens the exploration.
If you want to know what’s going on, you have to ask
But what made me gamble for hours, sometimes letting other gaming appointments whiz and writing this text here with just 4 hours of sleep, is the story.
You wake up without memory and first have to find out what happened. A strange voice on the phone only ensures that you understand less and if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you have to talk to people – atypical for real cellars – and hope that they will also answer.
Because not every NPC wants to speak to you or reacts positively to the selection of your dialogue. You only get important information, information and backgrounds to the story by finding spoken or documents in the world with NPCs.
Important: Each NPC can be killed. So if you accidentally skin someone on the mouth and he defends it, it can happen that you have BEEF with an important quest NPC. In principle, you can wipe out the entire quarantine zone and end the game, here you give you a lot of freedom.
Nuclear case has a very slim content at less than 20 hours, but it does not seem too short. On the contrary: there are a few tasks for which I always had to slip through the world. That was just at the border that more of it had boredom.
Sympathies decide how the game ends
Depending on how you decide, you will finally get one of six different ends with different results. How it ends depends on whom you are well put with, who survives which encounters and who you want to support.
Through Savegames I was able to see at least four of the ends, but some of them expired, because my course of the game has of course remained the same until then. An end stands out.
Attention, here you can read information at the end of nuclear case with information that you experience very late in the game
Oberon, which you should destroy, as a voice on the phone tells you, speaks of a group of somewhat crazy druids. If you decide to help this group, you have to sacrifice yourself in the end – and condemn the world to go under. Quite literally, because Oberon wants nature to exist again, not man itself. I don’t want to reveal who or what is Oberon, but I doubt whether in the end there is really a “natural” order … The end was still the best so far.
It is probably worth looking at at least a second time and making other decisions. With a look at the achievements on Steam, I missed some things that I want to catch up – including an end that I didn’t notice when playing that it could be possible.
Nuclear case will be released on Steam, PS5 and Xbox on March 27. With 50 euros, the game has a somewhat high price for the season, but I still liked it. If you buy the deluxe edition for 80 euros, you can play from March 24th.
It took me almost exactly 17 hours for my passage and the playing time is a small dispute after everything I observed. Some think that is too little for a game like nuclear case. Others are happy that there are full -fledged games that they can gamble through with little time. The discussion was initiated last year: “I am retired and don’t have 90 hours”-the old Playstation boss says that nobody takes any more games today that take 100 hours