Will you be the last survivor?
"Even in 2022 Mankind still possesses the power, to bomb itself back to the Stone Age"
— First Strike opening screen.
First Strike: Final Hour is a strategy game about Nuclear War, published by Swiss development studio Blindflug Studios in 2014 for mobile, then released in 2017 on Steam.
20 Minutes into the Future, and the world is on the edge of a nuclear war, with various nations arming themselves and new alliances being forged. The 18 Nuclear Superpowers, with their arsenals on high alert, are ready to fire as soon as they receive the All Clear. The world is doused in gasoline, and it only needs a spark.
You, as the leader of one of the nuclear powers, have to force all the others into surrender, or annihilate them in atomic fire. There will be no peace until there is only one superpower standing, whatever the cost may be.
- America Takes Over the World: The United States is the nation best poised toward victory, and also rated the easiest by the game itself. It has a nuclear and technological edge over all competitors, with only Russia having as many nukes, they are geographically isolated, and far away enough to be out of range of Cruiser missiles unless fired from Kamchatka and Britain, while having room to expand towards Canada or south towards Mexico and Central America and, unless Brazil is in the game, the entirety of South America is open to annexation.
- Balkanize Me: Canada has been completely divided into the constituent provinces, and unlike the Superpowers, there is no superior authority to the single regions.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: For both the AI and the Player, Alliances are just a formality that will will make sure that for a while there will be no nukes flying towards them from a specific superpower. As soon as the other superpower will believe to have the upper hand, or thinks that you are too occupied with another enemy, they will quickly backstab you, throwing everything they have in range to delete your faction from the map.
- Golden Ending: While it seems there is no way out of complete and total nuclear annihilation, there is an hope. If you decide to dismantle your nuclear arsenal, other superpowers will follow suit and dismantle theirs. After all nukes have been dismantled, the game will end and bring you to a different ending screen, congratulating the player for taking a massive risk and sending a powerful message to the world, successfully avoiding the most disastrous war in history.
- One World Order: The main objective and only victory condition. At the end of the game minor nations are either destroyed, assimilated into your Alliance or too insignificant to oppose you while the other superpowers surrendered or have been reduced to ash. Now you and your chosen superpower stand triumphant on a throne made of rubble.
- Russians With Rusting Rockets: The Russian Federation is a playable superpower, with the most nukes avaliable at game start, 8 devices, but somewhat behind technologically when compared with the United States which owns an equal amout of nukes.
- The End of the World as We Know It: The most obvious trope applied to the game. Your objective is to be the last superpower standing, forcing whoever is on your way to either stand down, or nuking them into oblivion. Even if you don't launch first, another nation will. The superpowers are so on edge that will interpret any action (building more nukes, researching technologies, annexing minor nations, creating alliances) as a threat to the balance of power, and will prop them to strike at you first before focusing on the others. While you can mitigate the effects of the war on your territory by shooting down the nukes aimed at you and there is another ending if a specific condition is met, most of the world will the completely destroyed by the War, with possibly a few safe havens that were spared by the apocalypse. Even in the shortest conflicts, before there is a last standing superpower numerous of cities will be destroyed, dozens of nations will be uninhabitable and the death counts will reach the billion.
- Title Drop: The game gives all superpowers the possibility to "First Strike" as soon as they have a arsenal of 8 nukes, launching every nuke they have in range towards a specific area. When a superpower fires, the music will be interrupted by the track aptly named "First Strike", and a message will declare "[nation] First Strike detected!"
- United Europe: Well, technically. In game there is a Nuclear Superpower, Western Europe. It doesn't includes all Europe, neither geographically or politically, as it misses most of the East and Iberia. It's used to represent France and the two countries part of the nuclear sharing agreement, Germany and Italy.
