It's hard to believe the day has finally arrived, but after 13 years of waiting, Duke Nukem Forever is on the cusp of release to the general public. Those who've been anxiously awaiting Duke's return, many of whom had given hope, shouldn't set their expectations too high.
It's ironic that the long-running joke was that Duke Nukem Forever would never see release. Duke was hailed as a king, alright - the King of Vaporware. Now that the game is finished after more than a decade, the joke is that it should have stayed buried forever. Duke Nukem Forever is an embarrassment , not only when compared to modern shooters, but even in comparison to its predecessor.
In the insanely long, overly convoluted intro to the game, which sees Duke wandering around environments with nothing to kill for nearly an hour, the President of the United States calls Duke, "A relic from a bygone age." He couldn't be more right. Duke Nukem Forever feels like something straight out of 1996, but with all the fun and originality of the original Duke Nukem 3D sucked right out of it.
How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways...
Remember how the original Duke Nukem Forever started with a bang, throwing you into the middle of alien ass-kicking right from the game's first moments? Don't expect that here. After the game-within-a-game boss battle, you'll spend about 20-30 minutes wandering around a television studio as Duke goes for an interview.
This type of thing isn't fun in any shooter, let alone one that made its name on balls-to-the-wall action. Oh, but there's a reference to Christian Bale's now two-year-old rant on the set of Terminator Salvation. How "cutting edge..."
Remember how the original Duke Nukem 3D had loads of cool and unique environments, ranging from expansive outdoor areas to adult movie theaters laden with secrets? The 90 minutes I spent playing Forever forced me along a rather linear path of similar-looking, cramped corridors and the occasional large room where a predictable battle lurked.
One of the few praises I'll levy towards the game is the highly interactive environments. Duke can interact with many things to boost his ego - his health meter. You can shoot hoops, play pool, play pinball, lift weights, and more. None of these functions are very fully featured, and are all done within the world, so they're not really minigames per se, but it's a nice touch.
Unfortunately, everything in the world is made of some super-shiny material - the shiniest known to man, by the looks of it - and then sprayed with water, just to give it that extra sheen. 360 owners may remember this look from a launch title called Perfect Dark Zero, but to say that Duke Nukem Forever looks like a six-year-old Xbox 360 game is inaccurate.
In reality, it looks like a six-year-old 360 game mixed with a 15-year-old PC title, as some of the textures are among the muddiest, ugliest, nigh indiscernable I've seen since the late 90s. Take a look at the camera lenses on the television studio set, if you need an example. It looks like it was ripped straight from Duke Nukem 3D.
Another thing they must have brought over from the 90s are the loading times. Hopefully you have a wealth of patience or a strange fondness for loading screens, because you'll be seeing them for quite a while. To add insult to injury, opening a door yields a slight hiccup as the game renders the room beyond, making gameplay anything but a smooth experience. How in the world this game suffers from longer loading times than much larger games such as Fallout 3 is beyond me, and I can only shake my head in disbelief.
The audio and voice acting are capable. Jon St. John reprises his most famous role as Duke, but all of his classic one-liners - many of which were cribbed from the Evil Dead films to begin with - have been replaced by more vulgar, less memorable lines such as, "Eat shit and die." When Duke Nukem 3D first came out, this type of language may have been shocking, but now it just seems like a desperate attempt to appeal to teens who think swearing is cool and "xtreme."
In fact, the whole game suffers from this problem. Duke Nukem Forever is so over-sexualized, crass, and vulgar it just comes across as juvenile. Perhaps that was the intention, but in the modern age when games like Grand Theft Auto and L.A. Noire have done mature content so much better, this just seems pitiful. Duke Nukem Forever seems like it was written by a sex-starved teenager taking his first stab at an erotic action film script.
The real shame is that I wasn't even expecting much from Duke Nukem Forever, but if nothing else, I figured it would be a fun, if mindless, twitch shooter. Quite frankly, you're better off replaying Duke Nukem 3D, which has stood the test of time rather well and is vastly superior to this poor attempt at resurrecting a franchise that should have been left forgotten. Or better yet, play one of the Serious Sam games for some fun with an old-school twist. After only 90 minutes of gameplay, I couldn't stomach Forever any longer, and I had to force myself to go that far into it in the first place.
You know what makes me angriest about Duke Nukem Forever? Thinking about the time Gearbox wasted on it when they could have been working on Borderlands 2 instead. Perhaps that is the greatest atrocity of all.
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