After 14 long years, Duke Nukem Forever treats us with mediocrity.
Like it's predecessor Duke Nukem 3D, DNF is a First-Person shooter where you get to kick alien ass and save Earth's beautiful women. The shooting action, for the most part, is decent and often challenging and the controls work as they should. However, shooting at enemies doesn't feel all that satisfying since they seem to lack punch in their hits. In addition to shooting, the game offers a much heavier reliance on first-person platforming, which is poorly executed to say the least. Your jumps feel floaty and sometimes you'll end up accidentally falling off an edge and either dying or trying to work your way back up. These physics issues also apply to some of the puzzle elements, which makes doing things like moving an alien ball incredibly cumbersome. There are also times where you get to ride around in a vehicle, like his monster truck, and even then it doesn't fare much better. To give the game credit, it tries to add variety; but it would have been better if they either removed these parts completely and focus on mindless shooting, or tried to fine tune the physics and redesign the puzzles.
Aside from the bad platforming and puzzles, the game contains other design flaws. A staple from Duke 3D returning here is the ability to interact with your environment and play little mini-games. However, the mini-games are very simplistic and are not in the least bit fun or exciting. It simply doesn't feel like the developers put time into spicing things up with the mini-games, which was nice little detail in Duke 3D. Interacting with various parts of your environment does help increase your health, or "Ego" meter. This leads to the issue of regenerating "Ego" and the fact that you can only carry two weapons at a time, two big elements found in the Halo series (which this game likes to make fun of) as well as various other shooters. In Duke 3D you can carry a massive arsenal of awesome weapons and it was fun to explore levels to look for health while simultaneously finding awesome new weapons. But instead they decided to follow common shooter credentials, which makes it feel unoriginal.
As expected, the graphics aren't really something to expect out of modern consoles. Textures are blurry, environments are bland, framerate is jittery, texture pop-in is abundant, and character models, especially the humans, are blocky and badly animated. Couple that with inexcusably long load times and you got a generally ugly package to look at. The sound design isn't much better. Stiff acting encompass the characters and the dialog and jokes are also poorly executed. Many of the jokes try to mock modern games but many just come off as lame, and there are moments that feel rather tasteless. If there is one good thing to say about the voice acting is that Duke himself still brings a few chuckles and decent lines. Aside from the awesome main theme, the rest of the music is simply forgettable and rather generic.
To sum things up:
PROS:
-Decent, challenging shooting
-Duke still brings a few laughs
-Tries to add variety
CONS:
-Dated visuals
-Bad platforming
-Boring puzzles
-Poorly executed mini-games
-Stiff acting and poor dialog
-Tasteless moments
-Forgettable music
If there was any reason to own this game, it's simply to have a legendary piece of video game history, but unfortunately many hardcore fans of the series will find a lot to be disappointed with. There are certainly better shooters, in fact, better games, that are worth your attention far more than Duke Nukem Forever.