The only winning move is not to play.In First Strike: Final Hour, you play one of twelve nuclear superpowers in a race to world domination. Each half-hour long game ends the same way: total obliteration. Whether you emerge victorious or become steamrolled by your enemies, the world suffers the consequences. The science fiction classic WarGames, in which a supercomputer designed to predict outcomes of nuclear war gains access to the real nuclear weapons control system, put it best: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”First Strike: Final Hour is a Steam port of the mobile game First Strike. It includes a few additions to the original game—like new superweapons—but is for the most part a simple remaster. Precise mouse movements make it easier to control your territories, but First Strike: Final Hour fails to take advantage of the keyboard part of the ‘mouse and keyboard’.
The only winning move is not to play. In First Strike: Final Hour, you play one of twelve nuclear superpowers in a race to world domination.Each half-hour long game ends the same way: total obliteration. Whether you emerge victorious or become steamrolled by your enemies, the world suffers the consequences.
You cannot use directional inputs to scroll across the globe or assign hotkeys to specific commands. After playing several rounds on my home desktop, I couldn’t help but wonder why I wasn’t playing the mobile version on the train instead.On the verge of a nuclear meltdown. Let’s see: how best to destroy our beautiful, precious irreplaceable jewel of a planet?Victory in First Strike: Final Hour is hinged on the effective timing of First Strikes, coordinated attacks on vital areas of an opponent’s territory. These use every weapon in your arsenal to obliterate a singular area.
Enemies will usually retaliate with a First Strike of their own, so it’s important to have both a massive offensive force and an impenetrable fortress of defenses. Some missiles will likely slip through on both sides. Keeping your forces spread out means that attacks on one or two territories won’t annihilate your chances of winning.Your opening move often decides the fate of battle. This is especially true in First Strike: Final Hour, where losses are often in the first ten minutes of the game. Expanding your territory, forming an alliance, and building cruise missiles must all be done before opponents have the chance to wipe you off the map. It’s usually better to play defensively and wait for opponents to decimate each other’s forces, then swoop in and claim their war-ravished territory for yourself.Committing to defense gives you more time to research upgrades like visualizations for incoming missiles or greater map visibility.
These can be difficult to process because the game marches on as you read their descriptions. It’s a good idea to memorize the most important nodes so that they become second nature in future playthroughs. At the end of each upgrade path, you can research powerful superweapons that can change the tide of battle.
The Global Strike Trident, for example, rains down a mixture of real and dummy missiles upon an enemy. Winning under certain conditions grants you access to additional superweapons in future rounds. It looks so beautiful from up here! A point amidst the chaos.First Strike: Final Hour sends a not-so-subtle message about the folly of nuclear warfare. Nuclear destruction permanently scars the planet, your capital city and its surroundings likely burned to cinder.
It becomes difficult to figure out whose land is whose when it’s scorched, a (possibly unintentional) ambiguity that highlights the morbid nature of atomic warfare. Only a select few spots are ever safe from the chaos, lucky to escape the scathing heat of the bomb. Even victories are rewarded with an uncertain “You Win?”First Strike: Final Hour is a game better suited for the mobile space. Its simplicity and fast-paced nature work great on the go, but when you’ve got a modern computer there are better choices—even in its genre. DEFCON and Plague Inc.
Are similar in concept, but include something notably absent in First Strike: Final Hour: a multiplayer mode. Playing solo works fine on mobile, where spotty internet access causes frequent disconnections. At home, no multiplayer neuters its longevity.
Every match starts to feel the same and the enemies become predictable. Unlike Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise, opponents are faceless countries with no personality. At $11.99 it’s a hard sell over the mobile version, despite its improved graphics and control scheme.Final Verdict: 2.5/5Available on: PC (Reviewed); Publisher: Blindflug Studios AG; Developer: Blindflug Studios AG; Players: 1; Released: May 31, 2017Full disclosure: This review is based on a Steam key of First Strike: Final Hour given to HeyPoorPlayer by the publisher.
Released 31 May 2017
Up until the 90's, the world went to sleep and rose in morning with the fear of becoming a handful of radioactive ash at any moment. The situation has improved since, and the spectre of nuclear war does not hang over our heads from day to day. Yet here comes a game that wants to teach us that nuking the world to cinder would be a bad thing. Here's First Strike Final Hour.
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Plot? We don't need no stinking plot. The nuclear bomb exists, and the world can't wait to blast itself to ashes. You get to choose one of several factions – USA, Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, Australia. North Korea and so on – that you will attempt to lead to victory and triumph over the radioactive wastes. That's it. Time to open up some canned sunshine!
So you have your faction. It may have one or more regions, a starting arsenal of cruise and balistic missiles (usually IRBMs), and certain advances in the research tree. That basically it as far as differences between them go. The combination of those factors determines the innitial difficulty of your playthough. For each region can only be doing a single thing at one time: building missile stocks (up to the limit), recovering after a missle launch, expanding into neighboring regions and doing research. Having more regions allows you to do more stuff at the same time. Poor single-region Best Korea!
Cruise missiles can be used to attack, but also to defend against enemy warheads. Ballistic missiles are attack-only. You don't start with ICBMs, but your research tree will eventually take you there as well as MIRV’ing your IRBMs to give them late-game functionality. You have to choose between attack and defense, as a region goes into cool down even after defensive cruise missile launches.
Trying to shoot missiles off one by one is tiresome, so the game has something that is called FIRST STRIKE capability. This unleashes all of the missiles that are in range of the area of the map your targeting – with some scattering, it allows you to wipe out entire regions at once. First Strikes are harder to defend against – and they invite other factions to launch a strike against you, too, since you won't be able to defend yourself. Remember, the regions that launched missiles are on cool down! This is less important when you’re attacking something half the globe (read: outisde cruise missile range) away, since you can have several regions devoted just to defense. However, when you’re nuking your neighbor, even cruise missiles will join in the party, which is not great.
The famous nuclear allies, India and Pakistan!
Another way to stave off nuclear disaster/all out war is to engage in diplomacy. This is done by going into the diplomacy screen starting talks with an another nation – however, the world still acts while you’re in talks. Time doesn’t stop for most menus, though there is one research branch that facilitates that, too. There’s nothing much to diplomacy – you only get that one option – and you can still break up with your allies by shooting down their missiles or attacking their lands. You won’t get a notification or indiciation on that – the only two clues will be the missiles heading towards your lands and the lack of a ribbon that joins your capitals on the map.
Betraying your allies is inevitable, not only because of accidental missile intercepts – before you research missile path prediction, you’ll be shooting down everything that flies near – but because the game doesn’t allow for an allied victory. You have to be the last nation standing, having conquered a radioactive wasteland (nuke an enemy region enough and it will become netural and thus capturable). Yet even then you will get a cheeky “You won?” sign.
Going all cruise missiles is an easy turtling victory – even if it takes forever.
That is because First Strike Final Hour is a lifeless wanabee DEFCON for smart phones and now Steam. You can see that the creators are clearly aiming for the anti-nuke message in the game, since they’re really not that subtle about it. The game removes fiddly stuff that would have uncomfortable to control on a touchscreen, like subs, boats, planes and manual placement of missile sites. It introduces some new things in the shape of regional expansion, research and super weapons… but none of them really add much to the topic of “nuclear war is bad, ok?”
DEFCON was wonderful in the way how cold and calculating it was. There was the palpable tension of going through the stages of DEFCON, trying to outwit your oponent. There we the death counts coming from the counter-value targeting of cities; FSFH also has those same reports, but they feel incidental rather than poignant. Since the game drags on an on – you can start rebuilding your stocks of bombs immediately after the post-launch cooldown expires and regions are never permanently destroyed – you don’t get the feel that the world is a blasted wasteland. Sure, the regions might be discolored, but as far as you’re concerned, all of them are 100% capable of waging war.
First Strike Final Hour is a lame attempt to reinvent DEFCON. It lacks the subtle touch of the previous game, the nerve-wracking buildup, and finality of that DEFCON 1 exchange. Instead, it turns nuclear war into this long, boring slog through the conquest of the world. There’s really no reason to choose this title over the the age-old gem.
It's hard to imagine Nuclear Armageddon being less exciting than this.
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