Nuke Your Neighbor is a sometimes-head-scratching version of Uno--only played with standard cards. The instructions are 12 pages long, so if you want to download the trial you're probably going to have to reload it several times before you even get the hang of the gameplay. Players take turns playing cards from their hands, either matching the current suit of the pile, the current number, or playing a wild card. If they don't have a move, they must draw a new one. Aces reverse the direction of play. Jacks can be played on any suit (and change the suit to their own suit). Sevens skip the next player. Fours allow you to go again afterwards. Twos act as a "draw-two" card on the next player. A joker, the most valuable card, acts as a "draw-five" card and also allows you to select the suit going forward.
The actual cards and shuffle/deal animations look pretty nice, but there's no real reason to use a standard 52-card deck at all. The whole game is digital, so why not just write "Draw Two" or "Nuke" on the cards themselves? Before each round starts, the game deals one card out to every player to determine whether or not gameplay will start off clockwise or counterclockwise. While this makes sense in a traditional card game, Nuke Your Neighbor is a video game--they could just pick one randomly and dispense with the time delay.
Instead of declaring "Uno!" when only one card remains, a button-mashing minigame pops up onscreen. Whoever enters the button sequence first is the winner. If you or a teammate have only one card left, it's a successful defense of your one-card status. If you beat someone else, they're hit with a miniature "nuke" and forced to draw two cards. While this is fantastic for creating some of the tension associated with quick-reflex games such as Slap Jack or Egyptian Rat Screw, it also ensured that my girlfriend had no interest in playing (she can't keep up speed-wise). It would be great if we could set individual handicaps instead of global difficulty levels (for instance, she could get a four-button sequence while I got a six or eight-button sequence).
When a player successfully plays all cards in their hand, the round ends and scores are calculated. Aces are worth 20, face cards 10, and everything else its face value. In team play, the winning team also gets a "victory" point, with the game ending at three victory points. We only played team games, so the points didn't seem to do anything at all. I assume they're more meaningful in the free-for-all deathmatch mode, which we couldn't actually play. To enter a deathmatch (even a local deathmatch), ALL players must have gold Live accounts. I had four players on hand who would've loved to try the deathmatch, but only one had a gold account--and even then it wasn't worth recovering his profile to test out.
Conceivably, the lack of local deathmatch is because of the game's emphasis on online ranked play. There aren't enough players online (we checked throughout the day for live opponents, but couldn't find any) to warrant this decision, so the lack of local multiplayer deathmatch just reeks of a poorly thought out feature. The AIs range from dumb to stupid-hard. We played one game against the "expert" AIs, and in one round they got seven nukes to our one. Because the game tries so hard to stay rooted in "classic" 52-card games, this statistical improbability just doesn't mesh (even assuming it's a two or three-deck game).
Minor text-clipping issues aside, clearly a lot of work has been put into Nuke Your Neighbors... which again is a bit of a head-scratcher. The over-the-top nukes and explosions seem geared towards a hardcore audience, while the gameplay itself is pretty casual. A simpler, more gender-neutral style without quite as much emphasis on ranked play would probably mean more players online and ultimately a more successful title. Even limited to local coop, though, we thought the game worked pretty well as a party game. At only 200 points, it's possible to overlook all the head-scratching elements and recommend Nuke Your Neighbors. Worth the points.
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I'm actually almost done adding symbols for each of the special cards, I've added symbols for the 2 and the Ace, and the Joker remains the same, I am still trying to think of something symbolic for the 4 and the 7, but so far I havent come up with anything.
I know the 12 pages of rules is a lot, but in reality most of the pages are only a couple sentences of text. I'm also adding a tutorial mode to the main menu, where you can play a psuedo round with instruction dialogs.
I could also add a local deathmatch, but everyone will see your cards, so it will change the game a bit, however it's always nice to have options when you get tired of playing with people of your team. Would that suffice?
Thanks for your comments.
I guess I can buy that no local DM rationale. Honestly, I sorta just wish there was a button mashing sequence you could have in real life while playing this with a normal deck of cards. You could make something up I'm sure- drop to the floor, do a pushup, down a sugar packet... might be fun.
This game took a little getting used to, and the use of the standard card deck really was a little puzzling at first until we read through the encyclo, er, rulebook. But this honestly is an enjoyable little card game. If there was actually a community for it on XBL, or if you could play 4-player local deathmatch, this thing would get an extra point of kickassitude in my book.
Thanks for the review, much appreciated.
I just wanted to clarify a couple of things:
- You can play 4 player local team matches without gold accounts, I'm not sure what the complication was but it is possible to start a local coop match with a single live account "who purchased the game" and 3 plain old non live profiles. In order to play xbox live all of your guests must either be an instance of a live account or a live account.
- The reason that you can't play a deathmatch with multiple local players is because they can all see your cards.
- Finding a match on xbox live is a numbers game. If you want to play a live match then your best bet is to select Xbox Live from the main menu then custom and then create a match against AI and start playing. While you are playing others who are searching for a game will be able to find your session and take over the AI player spots.
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