Duke Nukem Forever isn't the sparkling gem people hoped it would be, but it sure isn't the disaster it's clamed to be.
Weapons feel powerful and are satisfying to use • The Single-Player campaign is a decent length • The immature humour is a hilarious guilty pleasure • Soundtrack is pretty cool • Jon St. Jon's portrayal of Duke is spot on.
----------The Bad -----------
A lot of modern FPS cliches are crowbarred in just for the sake of it • A majority of the levels are dull in both layout and colour • Inconsistent visuals.
Most if not all older gamers would have heard of Duke Nukem, a womanizing, butt-kicking, bubblegum-chewing 90's video game icon. Many would have also heard the story of Duke Nukem Forever, the long awaited sequel to 1996's Duke Nukem 3D that had been stuck in development hell limbo for 14 long years before finally being released by Gearbox in 2011. It was at this point that it inevitably failed to live up to everyones ridiculously high expectations and was violently pounded into the ground by virtually every critic on the face of the earth.
Let me just kick off this review by saying that other than knowing a little bit of the series history, Duke Nukem Forever is my only real experience with the series. I didn't grow up with Duke 3D (or shooters at all for that matter) and I wasn't dragged through all the hype that lead up to its release. All I knew going into it was that people had been waiting over a decade for it and that upon release it was apparently one of the worst games ever made. But is it really? Read on.
STORY:
The game starts off in a rather interesting way. The first thing you hear is the same line that Duke says right at the beginning of Duke Nukem 3D. After the brief opening credits, the screen fades into gameplay where, as Duke, you're facing a urinal with an onscreen prompt to empty your bladder. Not long after, you are revealed to be in a remade version of the final battle of Duke Nukem 3D, right down to kicking the Cycloid's eyeball over a goal post. Right after that it's revealed that Duke was playing the video game himself while being pleasured by two women who were parodies of the Olsen Twins. A news report then comes on saying that the same aliens that Duke fought in DN3D had come back to Earth. For a while it remains unknown if they had come back to get revenge on Duke, to declare peace or to just grab a bite at Duke Burger while they were in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, the President contacts Duke and says that he and the Cycloid Emperor where having a meeting to potentially come to a mutual agreement of peace between the species. He bluntly demands that Duke doesn't act in hostility towards them to avoid a repeat of the last invasion. This later proves naught when the aliens start attacking Duke and ubducting the worlds babes for reasons unknown. The story does flesh out more as it progresses, but it mostly feels like a framing device. It becomes absolutely crazy at points and isn't expected to be taken seriously, at least I certainly hope it isn't. Overall, it's not that interesting.
GAMEPLAY:
This is arguably the games biggest strength, but also its biggest weakness. The shooting works fine in this game. The aim is smooth, there's a decent variety of weapons and the way enemies get dismembered by your more powerful weapons makes them that much more satisfying to use. There are some keys mapped to special items that can be used to give you the edge in combat. Beer, which makes you take less damage, but makes your vision blurry. Steroids, which force you to fight with melee, but make each hit a 1-hit kill. And of course, the Holo-Duke, which can be used to distract enemies. There's also an option to use "Duke Vision", which is basically Dukes take on Night Vision goggles. Instead of a health bar, you have an "Ego Bar". It basically serves as a shield for enemy attacks, any damage taken after your Ego Bar runs out really just makes the screen go red and Dukes heartbeat intensifies to indicate that he is near death. The Ego Bar however does refill by itself if you don't take damage for long enough and it can be increased by interacting with certain set pieces scattered throughout the levels. There are some brief platforming parts in levels as well. They're not as bad as a lot of people make them out to be, they're just like any other platforming section in an FPS. The only grating part is the grunt that Duke makes almost every time he jumps. It starts off mildly funny, but for some people it will become annoying very fast.
The level design is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the levels are pretty fun to explore, but a lot of them are uninteresting. The worst levels in the game are normally attributed to the ones that have little to no interective environmental set pieces, visually aren't that interesting and are coloured in gray or brown. These areas have a few hectic shoot outs, but when your surroundings are this dull and it lacks in atmosphere, it kind of drains from the experience. The biggest culprits of this level design quota are the levels set in the dark, slimy Alien Hive, the broken concrete littered ruins around the Duke Dome and a few of the levels set out in the desert in the later part of the game. My two biggest complaints about level choices are these:
1. Who came up with the idea to make a Vegas level set during the DAY.
2. Who's bright idea was it to set an ENTIRE level underwater? Especially when you can barely see anything, even with Duke Vision turned on.
Now that the negatives of the level design are out of the way, let's get to the good. The best levels in the game go like this. They're set in interesting places, the environments have plenty of detail, the level layouts are more that just straight paths, there's plenty of interactive set pieces and they actually have COLOUR. The first handful of levels are a lot like the Half-Life games in that there are no enemies and plenty of things in the environment to fool around with while you move on toward your destination. My personal favourite level in the game was Duke Burger. During the second part of the level, you're shunk down to size and have to navigate the kitchen. One of the employees is stranded on a box in the middle of the whole place and can't get out because the floor is covered by ankle-high water that has become electrified. To safely get out of the room, you need to get to the fuse box and turn off the power. Along the way you'll have to fight shrunken Pig Cops whilst using jars and cans on the shelves as cover. As well as that, there are platforming sequences where you have to dodge mousetraps, use a toaster to get to a higher area and jump on top of hamburger buns to avoid getting burnt by the grill. This part was certainly where the game shined brightest for me. There are fewer good levels in the game than the bad, but their quality manages to overshadow some of the terrible design choices.
The part where the overall gameplays weakness comes in is partly due to Duke Nukem Forever's long development time. It's the way many modern FPS cliches are included for little reason other than to try and keep up. The whole regenerating health system could've been avoided if there was armour and medkits like in DN3D, though admittably there is little else the Ego Bar system could be used for. Duke used to be able to run faster than a car in DN3D, but he must have eaten a few too many pies while waiting for DNF to come out. Now, running is achieved by tapping the assigned key/button and Duke will run for a few seconds before heavily panting and returning to walking speed. Another annoying cliche on modern FPS games (I will never forgive Halo for popularizing it) is a 2-3 weapon capacity. The kind of gameplay this game suits is severely held back when you can only hold two weapons at a time. Thankfully, there has since been a patch for the game that gives the option to have up to 4 weapons at a time. Even though it's not a huge difference, it made the gameplay that much more fun for me. The most pointless cliche that DNF has taken on board with it is Ironsight aiming. Aside from the scope on the Railgun, it is literally useless. It only zooms in a small amount, barely enough to improve your aim. Instead of ironsights, all those other weapons could've had a secondary fire mode, or at least make it so right-click was for a Mighty Boot attack or something.
In terms of technology, DNF is pretty easy to run on older computers. It's pretty well optimized for PC. It runs decently on my 3 year old laptop with 20-30 frames per second, and the loading times are still a LOT faster than those on the console versions.
VISUALS:
The visuals in Duke Nukem Forever aren't top notch, but they certainly aren't terrible. They're just incredibly inconsistent. The texture quality is all over the place on different objects. Dukes arms look pretty decent and so do most of the humans and aliens you run into. Some things are just embarrasing though. The weapons don't look all that great, with the possible exception of the Golden Pistol, and a lot of the environments, mostly the less detailed ones, have some pretty blurry textures and low resolution bump mapping. A lot of this stuff doesn't really bug me though. My biggest complaint is the lighting effects. Even in broad daylight, some things look way too dark. Worst of all is the Alien Hive. When it's too dark, you'll want to turn on Duke Vision, but you'll eventually run into a light area which will illuminate the Duke Vision and hurt your eyes.
SOUND:
The sound design in DNF is alright. It makes an effort to include ambiance even in the less detailed levels so that they seem at least a little alive. The guns have satisfyingly visceral sounds that add to how much impact your weapons have. The little interactive set pieces in the environents are well made, with great attention to detail for stuff like slot machines and the pinball machines that almost make you feel like you're playing the actual things.
The music isn't all that memorable, but still good. The people with slow computers and the others playing the console versions won't thank the game for the grating loading times, but at least there's a good track of music to accompany them.
The voice acting varies. First of all, Jon St. Jon returns to voice Duke Nukem and pulls it off perfectly. No one else could do it better. The rest of the cast of characters are pretty mixed. A lot of the characters voices are pretty generic and the rest are normally just awkwardly delivering lines that could've been better if they were done right. The Holsom Twins performance in particular was supposed to be carried across as naughty, ditzy and sexy, but instead just comes across as annoying. Luckily, we aren't supposed to care much about the supporting characters since Duke is the star of the show. He spends a majority of the game spouting situational humour and his infamous one-liners. A lot of his old lines from DN3D are redone along with plenty of new ones. Pretty much all of them are pop culture references, some of which pre-date 2005 and would go over the heads of a lot of people nowadays. This is just another thing that shows how old Duke Nukem Forever really is.
REPLAY VALUE:
Another one of the games best strengths. No matter where you are in the game, you can go back to the main menu and use chapter select to replay any chapter you've been to in the game. There are 4 nuclear symbols on one side of the chapter that light up depending on what difficulty you've beaten them on. It also keeps track of how many Ego Boosts you've found in each level, so you know if you need to go back and search the level for an interactive set piece. The best part is that your Ego Bar will keep consistent with all the Ego Boosts you've found, so replaying levels on a higher difficulty setting is than much easier. However, if you ever feel like starting fresh, you can start a new campaign that erases all your progress and resets you Ego Bar. Just be careful not to do it by accident.
CONCLUSION:
Duke Nukem Forever is undoubtably one of the biggest disappointments of the decade, but that doesn't mean it's terrible, it just means it didn't meet its high expectations. I personally quite liked it, enough to do multiple playthroughs at least. If you're a big fan of the old Duke Nukem games, I can't exactly promise a recommendation. You'll either be so distraught by DNF that you'll never be able to enjoy it or you'll be enough of a fan to enjoy playing it regardless of previous expectations. As for anyone else contemplating playing it, I myself am not a Duke Nukem fan but still enjoyed it, so you might too. It's not perfect, but no sane person should expect something to be perfect if it took 14 years.