Review | Duke Nukem Forever

Duke Nukem Forever. Say the words slowly, say them reverently. A game so long in development it had moved beyond a joke and into a sick parody of itself, the game that won Vaporware of the year for 6 consecutive years, the game that many presumed would never see the light of day, has finally released, and after 15 years of waiting, it’s all you could hope for and less.

Following up a mere 15 years after the release of the critical and commercial hit that was Duke Nukem 3D, Duke Nukem Forever looks, feels and plays like a game lost in time. With simple AI, linear gameplay and last-last-gen graphics, Duke has not aged well.

For many the previous game was one of the highlights of mid-nineties shooters. With its wisecracking protagonist and non-PC slant on the over-populated (even in 1996) first-person shooter genre, Duke Nukem 3D was hailed as a revelation by those who played it and something that still posits a legion of fans a decade and a half after release.

It is those same fans, myself included, who 2K Games and Gearbox are hoping to captivate again with the release of Duke Nukem Forever. Unfortunately it is those same fans who will feel the most let down by this, this tarnishing of a legacy.

Duke Nukem is one of the strongest and most memorable characters in gaming and Forever finds him “King of the World” after achieving almost every amazing feat you can imagine and having also saved the world in the previous game.

Forever finds Duke enjoying the high life in his home town of Las Vegas, revered by almost everyone in the country and waited on by two twin blond bimbos. When the alien menace who’s ass Duke kicked in Duke Nukem 3D return with an armada of warships, and start to steal Duke’s woman, all hell breaks loose.

Against the wishes of the American President and basically as a one-man army, Duke takes on the alien menace and, well, you can guess what happens next. The game takes you through a literal cornucopia of locations, why you’ll see Duke’s Hotel, Duke’s Casino and even Duke’s Stadium!

These locations are generally scant of any detail and are simple linear paths to the end boss. Sure there are different styles of game play thrown in for variety but these stylistic tangents just emphasis how cobbled together the complete game feels.

For example several sections of the game shrink Duke down in size to complete various puzzles or reach parts of the level that fully grown Duke cannot, while other sections find you in control of the Duke Monster Truck smashing through the empty countryside. While these levels are intersting diversions, they end up even more poorly designed and tiresome than the regular shooting levels

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Duke Nukem Forever however, and there are a lot of frustrating aspects, are the loading times. Sure, the game could be forgiven for taking a little longer to load than most other games, but the constant 30+ seconds it takes to load back into the game once you’re killed is unacceptable in 2011. Couple this with the fact that Duke is old school in its approach to balance, increasing the difficult by merely making the levels “cheaper” than you can imagine; and Duke ends up to be controller-throwingly frustrating.

Deep down inside Duke Nukem Forever, glimpsed in small sections of the never-ending single player campaign, are moments of real potential. Duke, when he is not spouting of inane and aged wisecracks, can deliver some comedy gold in a way that few other protagonists can; while snippets of levels, such as the penultimate Hoover Dam level, display the energy that is sadly missing from the rest of the game.

It’s not just that Duke Nukem Forever is a poor game, it’s that it is such a disappointment for fans of the franchise and fans of original games as a while. Here was an opportunity to bring back one of the industry’s great long lost characters, one of its strongest and update him for the 21^st century. Instead 2K has only been able to salvage a mediocre cobbled together game that will lose more fans that it could ever possibly hope to gain.

Playing Duke Nukem Forever is like stepping into a time machine. With graphics that simply don’t belong in 2011 and gameplay that harkens back to a time where a jump button was a novelty; the game just doesn’t belong here, up against the Bioshocks and Call of Duty’s of the world. Duke Nukem Forever feels like a relic of a long lost time in gaming, a wasted opportunity to get one of the most memorable characters into the hands of a new generation. [5]