
Fly near-future aircraft with immersive physics across dynamic battlefields, facing land, air, and sea threats. Wage war against AI or rival pilots using an array of advanced weaponry, including tactical and strategic nuclear weapons capable of annihilating anything in your path.
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Prices
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Every market we collect.
About
Nuclear Option is a combat flight game set on a dynamic and realistic battlefield of the near future. Use an array of advanced weapons to change the course of battles as you intercept bombers, duel fighters, fly under the radar, or unleash the fury of nuclear weapons on enemy formations.
Each aircraft comes with an immersive cockpit featuring a situational awareness HUD, identifying nearby targets and threats. Aircraft can be flown with various controllers or with a mouse-controlled "virtual joystick", requiring no special hardware.
Experience realistic flight dynamics, with stalls, spins and g-force effects fully implemented, as each aircraft is composed of up to 50 individually simulated physics parts . A highly detailed damage model means that the condition of each part affects the way your aircraft flies.
Build your own missions using the included mission editor, and then fly your mission solo or with friends in PVP or PVE multiplayer combat.


CI-22 "Cricket" counter-insurgency aircraft
T/A-30 "Compass" light attack/trainer aircraft
VT-7 "Vagrant" VTOL trainer
UH-90 "Ibis" utility helicopter
A-19 "Brawler" close air support aircraft
SAH-46 "Chicane" stealth attack helicopter
FS-12 "Revoker" air superiority fighter
FS-20 "Vortex" VTOL fighter
VL-49 "Tarantula" Heavy vertical lift VTOL
KR-67 "Ifrit" multirole fighter
EW-25 "Medusa" electronic warfare aircraft
SFB-81 "Darkreach" strategic bomber
"Alkyon" AB-4 strike bomber


Thirteen playable aircraft, each with scenarios highlighting their capabilities
Realistic flight physics, simulated across dozens of aerodynamic surfaces per aircraft
Detailed damage model with 30-50 detachable parts per aircraft
Player hosted multiplayer with a public lobby browser, supporting cooperative or competitive play
Various AI controlled ground vehicles and AI aircraft engaging in large, dynamic battles
Persistent battlefields with lingering wreckage and smoke
Targeting HUD and Target view screen in cockpits
Flight HUD with detailed aircraft parameters including angle of attack, velocity vector, climb rate, G force and radar altitude
Many guided and unguided weapons, including guns, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, bombs, cruise and ballistic missiles
Accurately simulated blast effects for explosions
Accurately simulated nuclear weapons with shockwave propagation
A 100km-wide map including various biomes and terrain types
A new, larger naval-themed map situated in an archipelago of occupied islands
Custom Mission Editor
Night missions with night-vision cockpit functionality
Countermeasures including IR flares and radar jammer

Add-ons
Each DLC is estimated with the same model as a game, then summed — a modeled figure, not reported DLC sales.
Updates
Build ids and update times come straight from Steam's PICS — the same source SteamDB reads. Patch history grows as we record new builds.
Engagement
Reviews
Themes across 1333 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
Reviews
So far not bad, somewhere between DCS and Ace Combat, with that nuclear flare that makes the planes unique while seeing their inspirations. I have a few gripes with some of the lock on/ Radar mechanics but otherwise its a fun game to play after the initial learning curve
Came from War Thunder, probably won't go back. I think this game provides more or less the arrangement I had always hoped for - dynamic combined arms (with an aviation focus) that encourages you to strategically take out targets, as well as conditions that allow aircraft with different intended roles to shine. The single-player missions are pretty challenging at first (especially because the AI ground targets actually pose a threat), but pretty rewarding once you get the hang of it. Lots of fun in its current state - very interested to see where it goes from here.
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Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English**languages with full audio support
Hours played at review time, across 1.3K reviews with recorded playtime.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
I'd love to recommend this software, I really would. My plane keeps snapping back to a point where the nose was three seconds ago. It's annoying as hell. Apparently this is normal. This is par for the course. This is how flying works. This is called 'fly-by-wire'. I want you to look at every single gif here on the store page, and ask yourself why this is never shown in the gifs. Then I want you Ctrl-F the store page and do a search for the word 'wire', and ask yourself why you can't find it. Something about that just don't sit right with me. This is a legit flight sim. This is not a game. This is a way for actual pilots to wind down. There is no good reason to hide this information. I feel like I got scammed. And just to top it all off, the gamepad support is a joke. You can rebind all the stuff you want, that's good. But the tutorials are for mouse and keyboard and they interrupt the flow of the game. I wanted to learn how to play the game, so I loaded a tutorial mission and picked up my gamepad. The 'take off' tutorial told me to drive around a corner, which I did. The tutorial stopped me in the middle of that corner - paused the gameplay - and put a wall of text on the screen. I pressed my gamepad buttons but nothing helped. I had to use my mouse to close that text. How am I supposed to close that text with a mouse while still turning a corner with my gamepad at the exact same time? Naturally, I drive completely off the runway because I wasn't able to turn hard enough, because I was interrupted by the tutorial text. This was my first experience with the game. Then the screen starts spamming me with a bunch of irrevelant crap, while I'm just trying to get my damn plane back on the runway, but I can't, because one of the wings is now completely broken. I don't know how to fix that, or if that's even possible. I don't know if I'm just supposed to respawn or carry on or what. Look at my playtime. I spent over an hour setting up this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing, and the tutorial was so useless that I ended up just flying on a random map - which is how I found out about the fly-by-wire thing. The community say turning off the wind helps. It doesn't. Imagine you're eating a hotdog and it falls in a pile of ♥♥♥♥, so you pick up the hotdog and wipe as much ♥♥♥♥ as you can off it. It's still got ♥♥♥♥ on it. Turning off the wind is like wiping the ♥♥♥♥ off that hotdog - it's less ♥♥♥♥♥♥ than it was before, sure, but it's still pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥. The devs literally stated themselves that the fly-by-wire won't be leaving the game any time soon, if at all. The idea for this game is amazing, but my entire experience with it was just one annoyance after another. I didn't get a refund purely because I was impressed by the amount of effort that's gone into the game apart from the tutorials. I'd say avoid this completely unless you know someone who already plays it. Total waste of money for me and it might be for you as well.
I can see that the developers were working hard and trying to create a game that doesn't have the grind of war thunder but i just really don't like how unforgiving the game is. I was expecting a casual semi realistic game where even if you knew nothing about military tactics you could have fun but I was surprised when i realized they were trying to teach you the notch strategy in order to evade a radar missile and even if you hold the ECM and do exactly as the game says you'll still get hit most of the time and in the real battle you have to be on edge and watch out for anti air missiles as well as other enemy aircraft. If you don't know much about fighter jets and military strategy you'll likely have a hard and frustrating time with this game.
very good game would recommend to play with friends
Great engine, great current/near future weapon physics with standoff ranges up to 100+ clicks (despite the somewhat arcadey ECM). Then get official/workshop linear/dynamic missions that spawn single carriers, surface action groups, ground units in convoys, and SAMs inside a 15 click bubble and enjoy the low-IQ ♥♥♥♥♥♥ clown show. Even arcade Air Combat 1 for the Playstation 1 has more believeable missions designs than this one here.
It's absolutely insane that this game is 20 dollars for the amount and quality of the content. It's a great middle ground between DCS and Ace Combat. The physics, weapons and aircraft behave realistically, with the "future combat" elements of the setting giving enough plausible deniability for mechanics that allow for more fun. There are missions, but the big selling point is the core conflict modes that pit two factions against each other in an arms race. You start as the dinkiest craft, and as the war escalates, you unlock crazier and cooler weapons, aircrafts, and ultimately nukes. Due to the depth of the anti air defenses in this game, you'll need to do a variety of missions organically to get your payloads on target. Dogfight enemy craft, deep strike enemy emplacements, then finally go on some stealth bombing runs. Very cool excited to start getting better at flying around. Absolutely crazy deal for the value proposition even already.
BANGERR, Very fun without it being a totally unplayble flight sim without a stick or thousands of hours. easy to learn and fun. 9/10 best 20 bucks ive spent
If you like Combat Fliers this is the one to play. The NO community is a wonderful group. I hope to see you in the air!
The game refuses to run past 5FPS, running on a 32gb RAM, 5080, 9800x3d setup, drivers up to date, and the software refuses to go above 5ps, absolute unplayable junk. Tried all launch options, playing around with settings, nothing would improve performance. Piece of ♥♥♥♥.
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