It’s understandable from a balance perspective, but it can lead to frustrating situations where the living player has no option but to resign themselves to failure. It’s also worth mentioning that the game requires both players to be alive to make any sort of progress, as a dead and unrevived partner slowly and inevitably causes their living compatriot to bleed out. As a result, deaths can feel less consequential and more random, which dramatically lessens the desire to jump right back in (another crucial component to the genre). In co-op, the screen becomes cluttered exponentially quicker, making it far more difficult to internalize and react the way you could otherwise. That’s not to say you’ll always act correctly, but you at least feel like the game is consistently presenting its challenges to you in an honest fashion. It may take some time, but you gradually get better and better at being able to quickly take in your surroundings and react accordingly. In the single player experience, combat is fast and furious, but also graspable. A two player local co-op mode is the offering here and, while fun, it can be frustratingly chaotic and occasionally undermines the most important aspect of the game: player agency. Sadly, on the co-op front, Nuclear Throne finds itself stumbling into the well-worn pitfalls of the genre.
The lack of hand-holding may not be for everyone, but I can’t imagine accepting any other format for a game that purports itself to be influenced by roguelikes.
Instead of constantly hanging the next unlockable over your head, it merely hints at the fact that those unlockables could exist and be obtained. Nuclear Throne is by no means a vanguard of this carrot-on-a-stick combination of real-life and in-game achievements, but it accomplishes it effortlessly. That said, there are plenty of unlockables to fawn over in the meantime. The path to the throne is, to a large extent, linear, so it’s easy to track the progression of your real-life skills as each run brings you closer and closer to your goal.
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