Imagine if the Cuban Missile Crisis hadn’t ended so well.
That, at least, is the premise for 1C Company’s Novy Soyuz – in 1962, cooler heads fail to prevail in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and both the USA and USSR nuke each other off the map. Set fifty years later in 2012, Novy Soyuz puts you into the shoes of a former Soviet bomber pilot who survived the nuclear holocaust in a bunker beneath Moscow.
This isn’t the first game to come out of the former Soviet Union that involves some sort of nuclear holocaust – see the Metro games and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., for some examples. But what makes this more interesting is that like Fallout, the Russian (Soviet?) society in Novy Soyuz seems to take its cues from 1950s/1960s environments – just look at the radio at the very beginning of the trailer for an example.
What’s also interesting about Novy Soyuz is the advanced age of the protagonist – as someone who was a bomber pilot during the Cold War, he should be well into his seventies by now. Whether or not this affects gameplay remains to be seen, or perhaps the radiation did something wonky like slowing down his aging (as radiation in fiction sometimes does).
Like Fallout, Novy Soyuz‘s combat will be in real-time with options to pause for tactical decisions. It will also feature experimental Soviet weaponry from the Cold War, which somehow feels less tacky and crass when it’s a Russian developer doing it in the first place.
The game is being developed by 1C Company, the studio behind cult RTS hit Men of War. While no official Western localization has been announced, Men of War has a devoted following, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see Novy Soyuz pass through the former Iron Curtain sometime soon.
Source: Reddit
Published: May 24, 2012 11:26 pm