Duke Nukem Forever… Really?!

Fourteen years. Give or take a year… Or two… Who knows! And besides, the wait is part of the appeal now anyway.

But… Why care? How has this franchise managed to maintain such a prophetic status amongst gamers of all ages?

Well, for me, I remember fondly playing Duke Nukem 3D. It was one of the first games I played on my first computer, a 486 with Windows 3.1 installed (it eventually got Windows 95, what a revolution!) and my brother and I would take turns killing aliens and blowing up the theatre screen with an RPG, so we could go behind the screen and… I dunno, dance or something.

Having not been part of the Doom crowd, Duke Nukem 3D was my first real action shooter experience, but that wasn’t what made it stand out; at the time I was playing Quake, Shadow Warrior, Rise Of The Triad and probably a bunch of other FPS’s… But Duke was something different. He was some random bad-ass who decided to take on the invasion single-handedly, crass and proud of it, the kind of guy you hated to love so very very much. The whole game just LOVED not caring about what people might say and I think that bravery in design resonated with gamers. It tastefully crossed boundaries, not going so far that it would alienate people but far enough that we all chuckled along at the knuckle-head who in the middle of an alien invasion decided to tip the strippers he randomly happened upon. It was also very open, for an FPS game, with lots of little tunnel’ie areas to explore and Easter Eggs to find.

So without going on and on and on; I loved Duke Nukem 3D.

Step forward to the present; fourteen years after a sequel was promised, FINALLY it has been delivered. Hail To The King, Baby! After being the most infamous piece of vapourware for the majority of my life, Duke Nukem Forever is finally here!… But it unfortunately doesn’t live up to my expectations.

I’ve wracked my brain for reasons why. In a lot of ways it’s very similar. Most of the things I thought I loved about Duke Nukem 3D are in DNF… So what’s the problem? Well, there are several. Firstly, Duke Nukem 3D came from a different era of FPS gaming, where Doom was the trend-setter and all other FPS games were reviewed based at least in part on their “Doom-ness”. Duke Nukem 3D didn’t aim to copy Doom, but it shared some qualities… and here they are;

• Fast paced; moving felt like driving a race-car through narrow corridors
• A huge arsenal of weapons at your constant disposal
• Difficult (verging on impossible) fights that felt expansive
• This ever present feeling that at any moment a tidal wave of monsters could come crashing down on you and eat your insides before you even noticed the first teleport noise

Here’s the problem… Duke Nukem Forever has none of this. Most of the game is spent sort of wandering at what feels like a leisurely pace between fights, which occur in what are basically closed boxes that unlock when all of whatever you’re supposed to kill is dead. All the classic Duke weapons are there, but you can only carry two weapons at a time (YES, HELLO, WE KNOW HALO EXISTS, THANK-YOU DEVELOPERS) which typically have fairly restrictive ammo reserves… Despite this, not a single fight I’ve encountered has taken me more than two attempts to get through and running out of ammo basically means just switching to the gun of some enemy you’ve just dropped by whacking them with your scrotum. I’ve not once been intimidated by this game, if anything it’s bored me.

On top of this, even after hours of graphical settings tweaks I still can’t manage to make the game run without jerking around in bits, which is sad as the graphics, although acceptable, are not the mind-blowing level that I’d allow to jerk my PC around a bit. There are even sections in which the game just freezes up for anywhere from 5-30 seconds, starting up again as if nothing had happened, as if Duke is having an absent seizure that we get the pleasure of experiencing first hand.

Lastly, the sexual nature of the game… I don’t know, honestly, is about my best response. Being literally subjected to a digital striptease I suppose was intended to be sexy and entertaining but for me it came out creepy and alienating. “Should I be turned on by that?” is something I ended up asking myself a number of times as I awkwardly tried to get through another section of game where gelatinous ALMOST human breasts were bared upon the screen. The answer I always came away with was “… No, it is as creepy as it feels.” I don’t have a good reason for this, but there is something distinctly disturbing about something ALMOST human trying to illicit sexual excitement in me; I’m apparently not a robosexual.

HOWEVER; I played it. Through all these hassles, I played the whole damn thing. In bits it was fun. But Gearbox really needed to decide whether they wanted to make Duke Nukem Forever a comical Halo/COD: Modern Warfare or a “classical” FPS, realism be damned. They kind of landed somewhere in-between, poking fun at games like Halo while unashamedly utilizing its mechanics; bringing back the classical (read: stupid and weak) enemies but without the feeling of constant peril. It almost feels like they just said;

“F*** IT! It’s been 15 years, anyone got FPS development experience? Yes? GOOD! GET IT OUT!”

and forgot to playtest the result…

All that being said, I’m happier to have a not-perfect game now than no game after another 3 years of failed playtests and revisions. Yes, that is a backhanded compliment and yes, it is the perfect way to end this poor game’s review.