Nuclear Design Bureau

Disappointing. Annoying UI, bad scaling. Tutorial messages overlap with settings menu, detonation viewer lags the rest of the game. Borderless window mode can be accidentally resized if you try to drag an element close to the edge. Lots of small irritating things like that that make me not want to play the game. I understand this is a cheap game and early access, but for something that is 99% placing shapes on a grid, it is inexcusable for the 'placing shapes' part to be this fiddly and annoying.

Remember how you were making all those nukes in Powder Toy when you were 10? Yeah, this is it but for the grown-ups. The 3D detonation render is a bit laggy but otherwise, it's cool. I'm glad this game is out of the very specific kind of development hell it was in.

Great fun. Nice physics simulations, probably about as accurate as you can get them as a developer without an unfortunate visit from one or two three-letter agencies. Doesn't hold your hand too much, which is nice. Made a bomb so big I crashed my game. 10/10. Dev, if you're after feature requests: let us record the simulation and then play it back afterwards at a configurable speed, so we can watch stuff back without needing to re-run the simulation itself. Edit: re-running without the crash netted a 2.2MT bomb without looking at the manual, in a playtime of about 3.7 hours. Latent knowledge from being a teenage physics geek back in the day pays off! Plenty of replayability though, messing around optimising the designs. I'm sure the community will have fun trying to make the biggest boom they can.

First thing I did was recreate the demon core, then I did it again in the experimental first person mode. It's a pretty dry experience, but it's exactly what I wanted out of a nuclear weapon design game. 10/10 would irradiate myself again.

It's a fun simulation that gets enough right to be interesting. The UI and sort of... product in general need some work, but (appropriately) the core is here. It is extremely easy to design a weapon that gets some yield if you understand the basic principles, but appropriately difficult to make an efficient weapon. I think I'll be spending a shameful number of hours playing around with this in the coming months.

Do not buy this, especially not in its current state. The AI use nearly stopped me from buying, and I was about to excuse the AI use if it wasn't for a game-breaking bug where switching from sphere to drag then back in the editor would make clicking and dragging to draw stop working. There's also AI images in the manual. This game, at least right now, is not worth the $10USD I paid.

It's interesting, and I really want to like it, but the game needs a lot longer to cook before I could say it's worth playing. I think it's also important to point out that nearly all the text is clearly written with AI, which, along with some of the AI art, just robs this game of soul, which is a shame.

Nuclear Design Bureau is an absolute triumph of niche engineering simulation. It nails the claustrophobic tension, Cold War paranoia, and terrifying physics of early atomic testing better than anything else out there. If your ideal game night involves stare-downs with differential equations, balancing neutron transport graphs, and the looming threat of state reprimand—this is an instant buy. It scratches the exact same ruthless, uncompromising itch as Children of a Dead Earth, HighFleet, and Kerbal Space Program (with nuclear physics dialed up to 11). Score: 9.5 / 10 (10/10 would accidentally vaporize a subcritical beryllium tamper into radioactive slag again.)

Wow, is mine really the first review? Awesome I saw Scott Manley's playthrough literally yesterday and wishlisted immediately, believing it would be months before we saw the first early access release and I'm very pleasantly surprised Obviously, I've barely started but already, I love the idea, love the music, the KSP-vibes of the 3D lab you can interact with (which I don't remember Scott showing off) I really love where this is going. The fact the NNSA had to be convinced this could be published due to security concerns is a great selling point from my point of view, lol. I can't wait to get deeper into this One small critique I have is that a scalable interface would be helpful, which I'm sure is planned or might even already exist but I haven't been able to find it yet I'll revisit this review once I've played awhile but for such a one of a kind game, I'm in it for the long-haul already